Baby seal pups picture courtesy of www.noaanews.noaa.gov

For book club this month, the group is reading the wonderful    Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling.   For those of you who love animal stories, this is a must to put on your reading list. 

I want to share with you a beautiful piece in the book that is labeled as "Seal lullaby"  It is sung by a mother seal to her pup as he is growing and getting ready to swim in the ocean.

Oh! hush thee, my baby, the night is behind us,

And black are the waters that sparkled so green.

The moon, o'er the combers, looks downward to find us.  

At rest in the hollows that rustle between.        

Where billow meets billow, there soft be thy pillow; 

Ah, weary wee flipperling, curl at they ease! 

Storm shall not wake thee, nor shark overtake thee,

Asleep in the arms of the slow-swinging seas.  

What a beautiful, sweet song.  You can hear the melody as you read along.  And how adorable is the word flipperling!  

What I love about books is, there is always a trail to follow.  When you pick one book up, it leads to another.  In the case of the Jungle Book, my lover recognised the story of "The White Seal" from his childhood.  So much so that he thought that an author had taken the words off Rudyard Kipling and used them in a children's book.  So off he went to his book shelf, only to find that particular children's copy of  " The White Seal", by Rudyard Kipling!  

                                Anybody else read this as a child?                                                     (This picture is actually of the movie...)              

tks

jennine