the Red Sea. The
Parsee found it, and kept it to play with. The Parsee's name was
Pestonjee Bomonjee, and the Rhinoceros was called Strorks, because he
breathed through his mouth instead of his nose. I wouldn't ask anything
about the cooking-stove if _I_ were you.]

Presently the Parsee came by and found the skin, and he smiled one
smile that ran all round his face two times. Then he danced three times
round the skin and rubbed his hands. Then he went to his camp and filled
his hat with cake-crumbs, for the Parsee never ate anything but cake,
and never swept out his camp. He took that skin, and he shook that skin,
and he scrubbed that skin, and he rubbed that skin just as full of old,
dry, stale, tickly cake-crumbs and some burned currants as ever it could
_possibly_ hold. Then he climbed to the top of his palm-tree and waited
for the Rhinoceros to come out of the water and put it on.

[Illustration: THIS is the Parsee Pestonjee Bomonjee sitting in his
palm-tree and watching the Rhinoceros Strorks bathing near the beach
of the Altogether Uninhabited Island after Strorks had taken off his
skin. The Parsee has put the cake-crumbs into the skin, and he is
smiling to think how they will tickle Strorks when Strorks puts it on
again. The skin is just under the rocks below the palm-tree in a cool
place; that is why you can't see it. The Parsee is wearing a new
more-than-oriental-splendour hat of the sort that Parsees wear; and he
has a knife in his hand to cut his name on palm-trees. The black things
on the islands out at sea are bits of ships that got wrecked going down
the Red Sea; but all the passengers were saved and went home.

The black thing in the water close to the shore is not a wreck at all.
It is Strorks the Rhinoceros bathing without his skin. He was just as
black underneath his skin as he was outside. I wouldn't ask anything
about the cooking-stove if _I_ were you.]

And the Rhinoceros did. He buttoned it up with the three buttons,
and it tickled like cake-crumbs in bed. Then he wanted to scratch, but
that made it worse; and then he lay down on the sands and rolled and
rolled and rolled, and every time he rolled the cake-crumbs tickled him
worse and worse and worse. Then he ran to the palm-tree and rubbed and
rubbed and rubbed himself against it. He rubbed so much and so hard that
he rubbed his skin into a great fold over his shoulders, and another
fold underneath, where the buttons used to be (but he rubbed