"Rikki-tikki-tavi," by Rudyard Kipling

In which a mongoose is found by a family, and defends them against the wicked cobras who live in their garden, and in which our narrator thinks you should just be grateful that the humans were the only ones with attempted British accents.



"Rikki-tikki-tavi" was originally published in 1894 in Kipling's The Jungle Book (which, yes, has more than just the Mowgli stories in it), and is now perhaps most familiar to people of recent generations through the 1975 animated version by Chuck Jones. The book, and thus this story was thoroughly illustrated by Rudyard Kipling's father, John Lockwood Kipling. Despite being a short story, Kipling the Elder illustrated it to nearly Denslowian proportions, so all of them are after the jump.