conversation of humanized locomotives, the steeds of steel that puff and
pant in and out of the roundhouse in an American railroad yard. Yet one
more extension of the pattern enabled him to take a final step; after
having given a human soul to separate engines, he proceeded then to
animate the several parts of a single machine. And thus we have 'How the
Ship Found Herself' and the later 'Below the Mill-dam.' But altho these
are successive stages of the primitive beast-fable as it has been
modified in Mr. Kipling's restless hands, there is little flagrant
originality, even at the end, since 'How the Ship Found Herself' is seen
to be only an up-to-date version of one of the earliest fables, the
'Belly and the Members.'

Interesting as it may be to clamber up into the spreading family-tree of
fiction, it is not here that we must seek for the stem from which the
Mowgli stories ultimately flowered. These stories are not directly
derived from the beast-fable, altho his mastery of that literary pattern
may have helped the author to find his final form. They are a
development from one of his own tales, 'In the Rukh,' included at first
in 'Many Inventions,' and now transferred to its proper place at the end
of the book in which the adventures of Mowgli are recorded. In that
first tale, which is now the last, we have set before us the impression
Mowgli and his little brothers, the wolves, made upon two white men in
the Indian service; and incidentally we are permitted to snatch a
glimpse or two of Mowgli's youth in the jungle. But the story is told
from the point of view of these white men; and it is small wonder that
when the author came to look again at what he had written he saw how
rich it was in its possibilities. He was moved to go back to narrate the
whole series of Mowgli's adventures from the very beginning, with Mowgli
himself as the center of the narrative and with little obtrusion of the
white man's civilization.