he would have been the last person in the world to
call these bites, for he knew what real biting meant.

'_Arre! arre!_' said two or three women together. 'To be bitten by
wolves, poor child! He is a handsome boy. He has eyes like red fire.
By my honour, Messua, he is not unlike thy boy that was taken by the
tiger.'

'Let me look,' said a woman with heavy copper rings on her wrists and
ankles, and she peered at Mowgli under the palm of her hand. 'Indeed
he is not. He is thinner, but he has the very look of my boy.'

The priest was a clever man, and he knew that Messua was wife to the
richest villager in the place. So he looked up at the sky for a
minute, and said solemnly: 'What the jungle has taken the jungle has
restored. Take the boy into thy house, my sister, and forget not to
honour the priest who sees so far into the lives of men.'

'By the Bull that bought me,' said Mowgli to himself, 'but all this
talking is like another looking over by the Pack! Well, if I am a
man, a man I must be.'

The crowd parted as the woman beckoned Mowgli to her hut, where there
was a red lacquered bedstead, a great earthen grain-chest with funny
raised patterns on it, half a dozen copper cooking-pots, an image of
a Hindu god in a little alcove, and on the wall a real looking-glass,
such as they sell at the country fairs for eight cents.

She gave him a long drink of milk and some bread, and then she laid
her hand on his head and looked into his eyes; for she thought
perhaps that he might be her real son come back from the jungle where
the tiger had taken him. So she said: 'Nathoo, O Nathoo!' Mowgli did
not show that he knew the name. 'Dost thou not remember the day when
I gave thee thy new shoes?' She touched his foot, and it was almost
as hard as horn. 'No,' she said, sorrowfully; 'those feet have never
worn shoes, but thou art very like my Nathoo, and thou shalt be my
son.'

Mowgli was uneasy, because he had never been under a roof before; but
as he looked at the thatch, he saw that he could tear it out any time
if he wanted to get away, and that the window had no fastenings.
'What is the good of a man,' he said to himself at last, 'if he does
not understand man's talk? Now I am as silly and dumb as a man would
be with us in the jungle. I must speak their talk.'

He had not learned while he was with the wolves to imitate the
challenge of bucks in the jungle and the grunt of the little wild pig
for fun. So, as soon as Mess