use he mispronounced some word, only the knowledge that it was
unsportsmanlike to kill little naked cubs kept him from picking them
up and breaking them in two. He did not know his own strength in the
least. In the jungle he knew he was weak compared with the beasts,
but in the village, people said that he was as strong as a bull. He
certainly had no notion of what fear was, for when the village priest
told him that the god in the temple would be angry with him if he ate
the priest's mangoes, he picked up the image, brought it over to the
priest's house, and asked the priest to make the god angry and he
would be happy to fight him. It was a horrible scandal, but the
priest hushed it up, and Messua's husband paid much good silver to
comfort the god. And Mowgli had not the faintest idea of the
difference that caste makes between man and man. When the potter's
donkey slipped in the clay-pit, Mowgli hauled it out by the tail, and
helped to stack the pots for their journey to the market at
Khanhiwara. That was very shocking, too, for the potter is a
low-caste man, and his donkey is worse. When the priest scolded him,
Mowgli threatened to put him on the donkey, too, and the priest told
Messua's husband that Mowgli had better be set to work as soon as
possible; and the village headman told Mowgli that he would have to
go out with the buffaloes next day, and herd them while they grazed.
No one was more pleased than Mowgli; and that night, because he had
been appointed a servant of the village, as it were, he went off to a
circle that met every evening on a masonry platform under a great
fig-tree. It was the village club, and the head-man and the watchman
and the barber, who knew all the gossip of the village, and old
Buldeo, the village hunter, who had a Tower musket, met and smoked.
The monkeys sat and talked in the upper branches, and there was a
hole under the platform where a cobra lived, and he had his little
platter of milk every night because he was sacred; and the old men
sat around the tree and talked, and pulled at the big _huqas_ (the
water-pipes) till far into the night. They told wonderful tales of
gods and men and ghosts; and Buldeo told even more wonderful ones of
the ways of beasts in the jungle, till the eyes of the children
sitting outside the circle bulged out of their heads. Most of the
tales were about animals, for the jungle was always at their door.
The deer and the wild pig grubbed up their crops, and now