ay the
hanging-on, over-surviving raffle of half-green things which the gentle
winter has suffered to live, and to make the partly-dressed stale earth
feel new and young once more. And this she does so well that there is no
spring in the world like the Jungle spring.

There is one day when all things are tired, and the very smells, as they
drift on the heavy air, are old and used. One cannot explain this, but
it feels so. Then there is another day--to the eye nothing whatever has
changed--when all the smells are new and delightful, and the whiskers of
the Jungle People quiver to their roots, and the winter hair comes away
from their sides in long, draggled locks. Then, perhaps, a little rain
falls, and all the trees and the bushes and the bamboos and the mosses
and the juicy-leaved plants wake with a noise of growing that you can
almost hear, and under this noise runs, day and night, a deep hum. THAT
is the noise of the spring--a vibrating boom which is neither bees, nor
falling water, nor the wind in tree-tops, but the purring of the warm,
happy world.

Up to this year Mowgli had always delighted in the turn of the seasons.
It was he who generally saw the first Eye-of-the-Spring deep down among
the grasses, and the first bank of spring clouds, which are like nothing
else in the Jungle. His voice could be heard in all sorts of wet,
star-lighted, blossoming places, helping the big frogs through their
choruses, or mocking the little upside-down owls that hoot through the
white nights. Like all his people, spring was the season he chose for
his flittings--moving, for the mere joy of rushing through the warm air,
thirty, forty, or fifty miles between twilight and the morning star, and
coming back panting and laughing and wreathed with strange flowers. The
Four did not follow him on these wild ringings of the Jungle, but went
off to sing songs with other wolves. The Jungle People are very busy
in the spring, and Mowgli could hear them grunting and screaming and
whistling according to their kind. Their voices then are different from
their voices at other times of the year, and that is one of the reasons
why spring in the Jungle is called the Time of New Talk.

But that spring, as he told Bagheera, his stomach was changed in him.
Ever since the bamboo shoots turned spotty-brown he had been looking
forward to the morning when the smells should change. But when the
morning came, and Mor the Peacock, blazing in bronze and blue