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.

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 head-man 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 and again the tiger carried off a man at twilight, within
sight of the village gates.

Mowgli, who naturally knew something about what they were talking of,
had to cover his face not to show that he was laughing, while Buldeo,
the Tower musket across his knees, climbed on from one wonderful story
to another, and Mowgli's shoulders shook.

Buldeo was explaining how the tiger that had carried away Messua's son
was a ghost-tiger, and his body was inhabited by the ghost of a wicked,
old money-lender, who h