’Thou wilt not forget that thou art a wolf?  Men will not make thee forget?’ said Gray Brother, anxiously.

’Never.  I will always remember that I love thee and all in our cave; but also I will always remember that I have been cast out of the Pack.’

’And that thou may’st be cast out of another pack.  Men are only men, Little Brother, and their talk is like the talk of frogs in a pond.  When I come down here again, I will wait for thee in the bamboos at the edge of the grazing-ground.’

For three months after that night Mowgli hardly ever left the village gate, he was so busy learning the ways and customs of men.  First he had to wear a cloth round him, which annoyed him horribly; and then he had to learn about money, which he did not in the least understand, and about ploughing, of which he did not see the use.  Then the little children in the village made him very angry.  Luckily, the Law of the Jungle had taught him to keep his temper, for in the jungle, life and food depend on keeping your temper; but when they made fun of him because he would not play games or fly kites, or because 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