Of course, in playing together, the cubs had often nipped Mowgli harder
than they intended, and there were white scars all over his arms and
legs. But he would have been the last person in the world to call these
bites, for he knew what real biting meant.

"Arre! Arre!" said two or three women together. "To be bitten by wolves,
poor child! He is a handsome boy. He has eyes like red fire. By my
honor, Messua, he is not unlike thy boy that was taken by the tiger."

"Let me look," said a woman with heavy copper rings on her wrists and
ankles, and she peered at Mowgli under the palm of her hand. "Indeed he
is not. He is thinner, but he has the very look of my boy."

The priest was a clever man, and he knew that Messua was wife to the
richest villager in the place. So he looked up at the sky for a minute
and said solemnly: "What the jungle has taken the jungle has restored.
Take the boy into thy house, my sister, and forget not to honor the
priest who sees so far into the lives of men."

"By the Bull that bought me," said Mowgli to himself, "but all this
talking is like another looking-over by the Pack! Well, if I am a man, a
man I must become."

The crowd parted as the woman beckoned Mowgli to her hut, where there
was a red lacquered bedstead, a great earthen grain chest with funny
raised patterns on it, half a dozen copper cooking pots, an image of a
Hindu god in a little alcove, and on the wall a real looking glass, such
as they sell at the country fairs.

She gave him a long drink of milk and some bread, and then she laid her