Stories · How Things Came to Be

The King and the Boastful Butterfly

13 min · England · Wisdom · Calm

In a palace garden at dawn, an old king meets a butterfly convinced of its own magnificence, and finds within himself the familiar urge to prove that he is greater. Choosing quiet curiosity instead, he passes a slow day among peonies, moss, and raked gravel, learning from a gardener and a single unmoved stone that the strongest hand is the one that never needs to close.

Retold from Just So Stories, by Rudyard Kipling.

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Story 4 of How Things Came to Be, starting at 42:04.