How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin

Once upon a time, on an uninhabited island on the shores of the Red Sea, there lived a Baker from whose hat the rays of the sun were reflected in more-than-oriental splendour. And the Baker lived on the island with nothing but his hat, his jack-knife, and a cooking-stove of the sort that you must particularly never touch.

One day he took flour and water and currants and plums and sugar and things, and made himself one cake, two feet across and three feet thick. It was a Superior Comestible (that's magic), and he put it on the stove because he was allowed to cook on that stove, and he baked it and he baked it till it was all done brown and smelt most sentimental.

But just as he was going to eat it, there came down to the beach from the Altogether Uninhabited Interior one Rhinoceros with a horn on his nose, two piggy eyes, and few manners.

In those days, my dear, the Rhinoceros's skin fitted him quite tight. There were no wrinkles in it anywhere. He looked exactly like a Rhinoceros in a picture book, only much bigger. All the same, he had no manners then, and he has no manners now, and he never will have any manners.

He said 'How!' — and that was all — and the Baker left that cake and climbed to the top of a palm tree with nothing on but his hat, from which the rays of the sun were still reflected in more-than-oriental splendour. And the Rhinoceros upset the cooking-stove with his nose, and the cake rolled on the sand, and he speared that cake on the horn of his nose, and he ate it, and he went away, waving his tail, to the Altogether Uninhabited Interior.

Then the Baker came down from his palm tree and put the stove back on its legs, and he recited the following words, which, as you have not heard them, I will now proceed to relate:

Whoever takes cakes That the Baker-man bakes Makes very dreadful mistakes.

And there was a great deal more in that than you would think.

Because, five weeks later, there was a heat-wave in the Red Sea, and everybody took off all the clothes they had. The Baker took off his hat; but the Rhinoceros took off his skin and carried it over his shoulder as he came down to the beach to bathe. In those days it buttoned underneath with three buttons and looked like a raincoat. He said nothing whatsoever about the Baker's cake, because he had eaten it all. He waddled straight into the water and blew bubbles through his nose, leaving his skin on the beach.

Presently the Baker came by and found the skin, and he smiled one smile that ran all round his face two times. Then he danced three times round the skin and rubbed his hands. Then he went to his camp and filled his hat with cake-crumbs, for the Baker never ate anything but cake, and never swept out his camp. He took that skin, and he shook that skin, and he scrubbed that skin, and he rubbed that skin, just as full of old, dry, stale, tickly cake-crumbs and some burned currants as ever it could possibly hold. Then he climbed to the top of his palm-tree and waited for the Rhinoceros to come out of the water and put it on.

And the Rhinoceros did. He buttoned it up with the three buttons, and it tickled like cake-crumbs 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 had rubbed the buttons clean off), and he rubbed some more folds over his legs. It spoiled his temper thoroughly, but it did not make the least difference to the 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.

(Freely retold for bedtime from Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, 1902.)