salmon fashion, they drifted tail foremost down the stream.

They drifted on together for a night and a day, but they never came to
the sea. For the salmon has but one life to live, and it ascends the
river but once. The rest lies with its children. And when the April
sunshine fell on the globules in the gravel, these were wakened into
life. With the early autumn rains, the little fishes were large enough
to begin their wanderings. They dropped down the current in the old
salmon fashion. And thus they came into the great river and drifted away
to the sea.

396

Probably no short-story writer now living is
better known than Rudyard Kipling, an English
author born in Bombay, India, in 1865. Among
his many stories are some that may be classed
as juvenile romantic nature literature.
_Just-So Stories_ is a collection of humorous
stories of this type, excellent for the fifth
and sixth grades. _The Jungle Book_ and _The
Second Jungle Book_, of a more serious nature,
may be used in the seventh and eighth grades.
The story that follows, taken from one of his
earlier volumes, illustrates well Mr. Kipling's
style of writing. It is suitable for the
seventh or eighth grade.

MOTI GUJ--MUTINEER

RUDYARD KIPLING

Once upon a time there was a coffee-planter in India who wished to clear
some forest land for coffee-planting. When he had cut down all the trees
and burned the underwood, the stumps still remained. Dynamite is
expensive and slow fire slow. The happy medium for stump-clearing is the
lord of all beasts, who is the elephant. He will either push the stump
out of the ground with his tusks, if he has any, or drag it out with
ropes. The planter, therefore, hired elephants by ones and twos and
threes, and fell to work. The very best of all the elephants belonged to
the very worst of all the drivers or mahouts; and this superior beast's
name was Moti Guj. He was the absolute property of his mahout, which
would never have been the case under native rule: for Moti Guj was a
creature to be desired by kings, and his name, being translated, meant
the Pearl Elephant. Because the British government was in the land,
Deesa, the mahout, enjoyed his property undisturbed. He was dissipated.
When he had made much money through the strength of his elephant, he
would get extremely drunk and give Moti Guj a beating with a t