KALA NAG, which means Black Snake, had served the Indian Government in every way that an elephant could serve it for forty-seven years, and as he was fully twenty years old when he was caught, that makes him nearly seventy—a ripe age for an elephant. He remembered pushing, with a big leather pad on his forehead, at a gun stuck in deep mud, and that was before the Afghan war of 1842, and he had not then come to his full strength. His mother Radha Pyari—Radha the darling—who had been caught in the same drive with Kala Nag, told him, before his little milk-tusks had dropped out, that elephants who were afraid always got hurt: and Kala Nag knew that that advice was good, for the first time that he saw a shell burst he backed, screaming, into a stand of piled rifles, and the bayonets pricked him in all his softest places. So, before he was twenty-five, he gave up being afraid, and so he was the best-loved and the best-looked-after elephant in the service of the Government of India. He had carried tents, twelve hundred pounds’ weight of tents, on the march in upper India: he had been hoisted into a ship at the end of a steam-crane and taken for days across the water, and made to carry a mortar on his back in a strange and rocky country very far from India, and had seen the Emperor Theodore lying dead in Magdala, and had come back again in the steamer entitled, so the soldiers said, to the Abyssinian war medal. . . .

So begins Rudyard Kipling’s “Toomai of the Elephants,” one of over three dozen marvelous tales selected by William F. Buckley Jr. to appear in the second volume of The National Review Treasury of Classic Children’s Literature. Also included in this 520-page tome are Kipling’s “The King’s Ankus,” Jack London’s “The Cruise of the Dazzler,” Mark Twain’s “Tom Sawyer, Detective,” Louisa May Alcott’s “The Blind Lark,” and many more literary gems that those special children in your life deserve and need to be reading. You can order this great collection here, its equally wondrous predecessor here, and all our other great titles at the NRO Store.