Tonight we’ll read a story called "The White Seal" from 1894’s "The Jungle Book" written by Rudyard Kipling. Kipling was born in India and raised both there and in England, working in India before settling to write these tales from a home he built in Vermont, USA. It is believed that Kipling wrote the collection of stories for his daughter Josephine, who died from pneumonia in 1899, aged 6. Many names in the White Seal story are Russian, as the Pribilof Islands had been bought (with Alaska) by the United States in 1867, and Kipling had access to books about the islands.