Just So Stories | Page 7

in bed. Then he wanted to scratch, but that
made it worse; and then he lay down on the sands and rolled and rolled
and rolled, and every time he rolled the cake crumbs tickled him worse
and worse and worse. Then he ran to the palm-tree and rubbed and
rubbed and rubbed himself against it. He rubbed so much and so hard
that he rubbed his skin into a great fold over his shoulders, and another
fold underneath, where the buttons used to be (but he rubbed the
buttons off), and he rubbed some more folds over his legs. And it
spoiled his temper, but it didn't make the least difference to the
cake-crumbs. They were inside his skin and they tickled. So he went
home, very angry indeed and horribly scratchy; and from that day to
this every rhinoceros has great folds in his skin and a very bad temper,
all on account of the cake-crumbs inside.
But the Parsee came down from his palm-tree, wearing his hat, from
which the rays of the sun were reflected in more-than-oriental
splendour, packed up his cooking-stove, and went away in the direction
of Orotavo, Amygdala, the Upland Meadows of Anantarivo, and the
Marshes of Sonaput.
THIS Uninhabited Island Is off Cape Gardafui, By the Beaches of
Socotra And the Pink Arabian Sea: But it's hot--too hot from Suez For
the likes of you and me Ever to go In a P. and 0. And call on the
Cake-Parsee!

HOW THE LEOPARD GOT HIS SPOTS
IN the days when everybody started fair, Best Beloved, the Leopard
lived in a place called the High Veldt. 'Member it wasn't the Low Veldt,
or the Bush Veldt, or the Sour Veldt, but the 'sclusively bare, hot, shiny
High Veldt, where there was sand and sandy-coloured rock and
'sclusively tufts of sandy- yellowish grass. The Giraffe and the Zebra
and the Eland and the Koodoo and the Hartebeest lived there; and they
were 'sclusively sandy-yellow-brownish all over; but the Leopard, he
was the 'sclusivest sandiest-yellowish-brownest of them all--a
greyish-yellowish catty-shaped kind of beast, and he matched the
'sclusively yellowish-greyish-brownish colour of the High Veldt to one
hair. This was very bad for the Giraffe and the Zebra and the rest of

them; for he would lie down by a 'sclusively
yellowish-greyish-brownish stone or clump of grass, and when the
Giraffe or the Zebra or the Eland or the Koodoo or the Bush-Buck or
the Bonte-Buck came by he would surprise them out of their jumpsome
lives. He would indeed! And, also, there was an Ethiopian with bows
and arrows (a 'sclusively greyish-brownish-yellowish man he was then),
who lived on the High Veldt with the Leopard; and the two used to
hunt together--the Ethiopian with his bows and arrows, and the
Leopard 'sclusively with his teeth and claws--till the Giraffe and the
Eland and the Koodoo and the Quagga and all the rest of them didn't
know which way to jump, Best Beloved. They didn't indeed!
After a long time--things lived for ever so long in those days--they
learned to avoid anything that looked like a Leopard or an Ethiopian;
and bit by bit--the Giraffe began it, because his legs were the
longest--they went away from the High Veldt. They scuttled for days
and days and days till they came to a great forest, 'sclusively full of
trees and bushes and stripy, speckly, patchy-blatchy shadows, and there
they hid: and after another long time, what with standing half in the
shade and half out of it, and what with the slippery-slidy shadows of
the trees falling on them, the Giraffe grew blotchy, and the Zebra grew
stripy, and the Eland and the Koodoo grew darker, with little wavy grey
lines on their backs like bark on a tree trunk; and so, though you could
hear them and smell them, you could very seldom see them, and then
only when you knew precisely where to look. They had a beautiful time
in the 'sclusively speckly-spickly shadows of the forest, while the
Leopard and the Ethiopian ran about over the 'sclusively
greyish-yellowish-reddish High Veldt outside, wondering where all
their breakfasts and their dinners and their teas had gone. At last they
were so hungry that they ate rats and beetles and rock-rabbits, the
Leopard and the Ethiopian, and then they had the Big Tummy-ache,
both together; and then they met Baviaan--the dog-headed, barking
Baboon, who is Quite the Wisest Animal in All South Africa.
Said Leopard to Baviaan (and it was a very hot day), 'Where has all the
game gone?'
And Baviaan winked. He knew.
Said the Ethiopian to Baviaan, 'Can you tell me the present habitat of
the aboriginal Fauna?' (That meant just the same thing, but the

Ethiopian always used long words. He was a grown-up.)