Böcker av Rudyard Kipling

L'habitation forcée / Rudyard Kipling; traduction de Louis Fabulet et Robert d'Humières; illustrations en couleurs de Jessie M. KingDate de l'édition originale: 1921Le présent ouvrage s'inscrit dans une politique de conservation patrimoniale des ouvrages de la littérature Française mise en place avec la BNF. HACHETTE LIVRE et la BNF proposent ainsi un catalogue de titres indisponibles, la BNF ayant numérisé ces oeuvres et HACHETTE LIVRE les imprimant à la demande. Certains de ces ouvrages reflètent des courants de pensée caractéristiques de leur époque, mais qui seraient aujourd'hui jugés condamnables. Ils n'en appartiennent pas moins à l'histoire des idées en France et sont susceptibles de présenter un intérêt scientifique ou historique. Le sens de notre démarche éditoriale consiste ainsi à permettre l'accès à ces oeuvres sans pour autant que nous en cautionnions en aucune façon le contenu. Pour plus d'informations, rendez-vous sur www.hachettebnf.fr

Once upon a time, O my Best Beloved . . . So begins this classic collection of gloriously fanciful tales of how things in the world came to be as they are. This collection includes the story of how the lazy camel found himself with a hump and how the insatiable curiosity of the elephant earned him his long trunk. It reveals how the whale was given a throat, and why every rhinoceros has great folds in his skin and a very bad temper. We also find out about the cunning cat that walked by itself, and how clever little Taffy and her Daddy Tegumai made the first alphabet. Rudyard Kipling first entertained his own children with these delightful, warm, and humorous stories, which he later wrote down for publication in 1902. Conjuring up distant lands and exotic jungles, they are bewitching for both children and adults. This sumptuous volume offers the complete and unabridged text, including the often-missing 13th story, "The Tabu Tal," which Kipling added for the American edition in 1903.

A huge swell pushed up exactly under her middle, and her bow and stern hung free with nothing to support them. Then one joking wave caught her up at the bow, and another at the stern, while the rest of the water slunk 251 away from under her just to see how she would like it; so she was held up at her two ends only, and the weight of the cargo and the machinery fell on the groaning iron keels and bilge-stringers. "Ease off! Ease off, there!" roared the garboard-strake. "I want one-eighth of an inch fair play. Do you hear me, you rivets!" "Ease off! Ease off!" cried the bilge-stringers. "Don't hold us so tight to the frames!" "Ease off!" grunted the deck beams, as the Dimbula rolled fearfully. "You've cramped our knees into the stringers, and we can't move. Ease off, you flat-headed little nuisances." Then two converging seas hit the bows, one on each side, and fell away in torrents of streaming thunder. "Ease off!" shouted the forward collision bulkhead. "I want to crumple up, but I'm stiffened in every direction. Ease off, you dirty little forge-filings. Let me breathe!" All the hundreds of plates that are riveted to the frames, and make the outside skin of every steamer, echoed the call, for each plate wanted to shift and creep a little, and each plate, according to its position, complained against the rivets. "We can't help it! We can't help it!" they murmured in reply. "We're put here to hold you, and we're going to do it; you never pull us twice in the same direction. If you'd say what 252 you were going to do next, we'd try to meet your views." "As far as I could feel," said the upper-deck planking, and that was four inches thick, "every single iron near me was pushing or pulling in opposite directions. Now, what's the sense of that? My friends, let us all pull together." "Pull any way you please," roared the funnel, "so long as you don't try your experiments on me.