Matters had gone ill all the day; and, to cap what is learnedly called
the perverseness of inanimate things, it came on to rain just as the
Boy, having finished his lessons, was on the point of setting out for a
romp in the brown fields.
"Isn't it perfectly mean, Mowgli?" he complained to his dog. The water
spaniel wagged a noncommittal tail and stretched himself before the wood
fire with a deep drawn sigh. The rain promised to hold, so the Boy took
down a book and curled up in a big leather chair.
It was a very interesting book--all about American pioneers, trappers,
and Indians; and although the writer of it was a German traveler, no
American woodsman would take advantage of a worthy German globe trotter
and tell him things which were not exactly so. For example, if you and a
trapper and a dog were gathered about a campfire, and the dog were
asleep and dreaming in his sleep, and the trapper should affirm that if
you tied a handkerchief over the head of a dreaming dog and afterwards
tied it around your own head, you would have the dog's dream,--if the
trapper should tell you this with a perfectly serious face, you
naturally would believe him, especially if you were a German traveler.
The Boy got up softly and began the experiment. Mowgli opened an
inquiring eye, stretched himself another notch, and fell asleep again.
His master waited five minutes, then unloosed the handkerchief and
knotted it under his own chin.
For a while Mowgli's slumbers were untroubled as a forest pool, his
breathing as regular as the tick-tock of the old wooden clock under the
stair. Out of doors the rain fell sharply and set the dead leaves
singing. The wood fire dwindled to a glow. Tick-tock! tick-tock! drummed
the ancient timepiece. The Boy yawned and settled deeper in the leather
chair.
Tick-tock! Tick-tock!
Mowgli was breathing out of time. He was twitching, and making funny
little smothered noises, which, if he were awake, would probably be
yelps. Something exciting was going on in dreamland.