Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling
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page 3 of 122 (02%)
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found one single, solitary shipwrecked Mariner, trailing his
toes in the water. (He had his mummy's leave to paddle, or else he would never have done it, because he was a man of infinite- resource-and-sagacity.) Then the Whale opened his mouth back and back and back till it nearly touched his tail, and he swallowed the shipwrecked Mariner, and the raft he was sitting on, and his blue canvas breeches, and the suspenders (which you _must_ not forget), _and_ the jack-knife--He swallowed them all down into his warm, dark, inside cup-boards, and then he smacked his lips--so, and turned round three times on his tail. But as soon as the Mariner, who was a man of infinite-resource- and-sagacity, found himself truly inside the Whale's warm, dark, inside cup-boards, he stumped and he jumped and he thumped and he bumped, and he pranced and he danced, and he banged and he clanged, and he hit and he bit, and he leaped and he creeped, and he prowled and he howled, and he hopped and he dropped, and he cried and he sighed, and he crawled and he bawled, and he stepped and he lepped, and he danced hornpipes where he shouldn't, and the Whale felt most unhappy indeed. (_Have_ you forgotten the suspenders?) So he said to the 'Stute Fish, 'This man is very nubbly, and besides he is making me hiccough. What shall I do?' 'Tell him to come out,' said the 'Stute Fish. So the Whale called down his own throat to the shipwrecked |
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