There is a widespread belief in rural India that wolves, instead of devouring these babies, occasionally bring them up amongst their own young ones. It has been questioned whether these stories of "wolf-boys" have any foundation in fact. A schoolmaster, whose evidence was reliable, told me that he had actually seen a boy of this description brought to a mission in North India by people who had found him in the jungle. They led him by a string, as if he had been a wild animal. The Mission accepted the charge, and the boy proved quiet and docile; but he never learnt to speak, nor, in fact, was it possible to teach him anything. He did not join the other boys in their games. When he went to church he sat there quietly, but without any apparent understanding of what it meant. He learnt, however, to smoke, and made signs to indicate that a cigarette would be acceptable; and if one was given him he gave a kind of salute by way of acknowledgment, which shows that his mind was not quite a blank. He seemed to be about ten years old when the people brought him, but whether he was still alive the schoolmaster did not know. Even in this case there was no direct evidence to connect the boy with wolves. But the natives have so many stories of the kind that it would seem likely that there is some truth in them. It is not inconceivable that the young wolves might welcome the arrival of the strange child as a new playmate, and that if its life was spared at the first the wolf-boy would, through his human nature, gain a sort of ascendancy over his foster-parents, and they would eventually fear to hurt him, after the fashion of Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling's _Jungle Book_. The Asiatic lion is sometimes spoken of slightingly, as if it was a feeble creature and almost extinct. A visit to Kathiawar, in Guzerat, would dispel the idea. In one forest alone, only a few years back, there were said to be a hundred lions, which were the terror of the surrounding villages. One of these lions in recent years killed an officer who formed one of a shooting party organised for the benefit of one of the former governors of Bombay. CHAPTER XXVI SOME INDIAN ANIMALS The squirrel. The tame antelope. Effect of the railway. Monkeys in Delhi. In the jungle. Wild pigs; their destruction. The mongoose. The buffalo; its milk; its disposition. The Indian donkey. Hard labour. Poor fare. Indian callousness. Elephants. Camels. The horse.