irts of a village.

"Ho!" said Mowgli, sitting down noiselessly, after sending back a deep
wolf-growl that silenced the curs. "What comes will come. Mowgli, what
hast thou to do any more with the lairs of the Man-Pack?" He rubbed his
mouth, remembering where a stone had struck it years ago when the other
Man-Pack had cast him out.

The door of the hut opened, and a woman stood peering out into the
darkness. A child cried, and the woman said over her shoulder, "Sleep.
It was but a jackal that waked the dogs. In a little time morning
comes."

Mowgli in the grass began to shake as though he had fever. He knew that
voice well, but to make sure he cried softly, surprised to find how
man's talk came back, "Messua! O Messua!"

"Who calls?" said the woman, a quiver in her voice.

"Hast thou forgotten?" said Mowgli. His throat was dry as he spoke.

"If it be THOU, what name did I give thee? Say!" She had half shut the
door, and her hand was clutching at her breast.

"Nathoo! Ohe, Nathoo!" said Mowgli, for, as you remember, that was the
name Messua gave him when he first came to the Man-Pack.

"Come, my son," she called, and Mowgli stepped into the light, and
looked full at Messua, the woman who had been good to him, and whose
life he had saved from the Man-Pack so long before. She was older,
and her hair was gray, but her eyes and her voice had not changed.
Woman-like, she expected to find Mowgli where she had left him, and her
eyes travelled upward in a puzzled way from his chest to his head, that
touched the top of the door.

"My son," she stammered; and then, sinking to his feet: "But it is no
longer my son. It is a Godling of the Woods! Ahai!"

As he stood in the red light of the oil-lamp, strong, tall, and
beautiful, his long black hair sweeping over his shoulders, the knife
swinging at his neck, and his head crowned with a wreath of white
jasmine, he might easily have been mistaken for some wild god of a
jungle legend. The child half asleep on a cot sprang up and shrieked
aloud with terror. Messua turned to soothe him, while Mowgli stood
still, looking in at the water-jars and the cooking-pots, the grain-bin,
and all the other human belongings that he found himself remembering so
well.

"What wilt thou eat or drink?" Messua murmured. "This is all thine. We
owe our lives to thee. But art thou him I called Nathoo, or a Godling,
indeed?"

"I am Nathoo," said Mowgli, "I am very far from my own place. I saw this