Just So Stories for Little Children is a collection of origin stories by the British author Rudyard Kipling. Considered a classic of children's literature, the book is among Kipling's best known works.

Kipling began working on the book by telling the first three chapters as bedtime stories to his daughter Josephine. These had to be told just so (exactly in the words she was used to) or she would complain. The stories illustrate how animals obtained their distinctive features, such as how the leopard got his spots.

Morals and Dogma is a collection of thirty-two essays which provide a philosophical rationale for the degrees (membership levels) of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite.

The lectures provided a backdrop for the degrees by giving lessons in comparative religion, history, and philosophy.

According to the Greek historian Herodotus, the fables were written by a slave named Aesop, who lived in Ancient Greece during the 5th century BCE. Aesop's fables and the Indian tradition as represented by the Buddhist Jataka Tales and the Hindu Panchatantra share about a dozen tales in common although often widely differing in detail. There is therefore some debate over whether the Greeks learned these fables from Indian storytellers or the other way, or if the influences were mutual.

Louisa May Alcott was an American novelist best known as author of the novel Little Women. In the mid-1860s, Alcott wrote passionate, fiery novels and sensational stories. She also produced wholesome stories for children, and after their positive reception, she did not generally return to creating works for adults. Alcott continued to write until her death.

A 19th-century English family - discovers a young mongoose half drowned from a flood. They revive it and decide to keep it as a pet. The young mongoose, named Rikki Tikki Tavi, finds himself confronted by two dangerous king cobras, Nag and his even more dangerous wife Nagaina, who had the run of the garden while the house was unoccupied.

Isabella Lilias Trotter was an artist and a Christian missionary for over 38 years to the Muslims of Algeria. After serving God in England for a time with the YWCA, she went with her own funding to Algeria to serve God there. In 1888 she founded the Algiers Mission Band. In 1964 the Algiers Mission Band became incorporated into Arab World Ministries.

After reaching Philadelphia, Tubman began thinking of her family. I was a stranger in a strange land, she said later. My father, my mother, my brothers, and sisters, and friends were in Maryland. But I was free, and they should be free.

For 11 years Tubman returned again and again to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, rescuing some 70 slaves in 13 expeditions, including her three other brothers, Henry, Ben, and Robert, their wives and some of their children.

The Man-eaters of Tsavo and other East African Adventures is a book written by John Henry Patterson in 1907 about a pair of lions that he killed in Kenya, known as the Tsavo man-eaters.

The book describes attacks by man-eating lions on the builders of the Uganda Railway in Tsavo, Kenya in 1898 and how the lions were eventually killed by Patterson. It was remarkable as nearly 140 people were killed by the man-eaters in less than a year before Patterson managed to kill them.

Professor Godfrey St. Peter doesn't like the new direction that his life has taken. When he and his wife move into their new house, he decides to keep his study at the old house so that he will not have to let go of the way life used to be. After a gas leak, causing a near death experience, that he almost welcomed, he realizes that he needs to find a new way to cope.