[August 2nd 2008] Written while Kipling was in holiday from
Vermont, living near his parents at Tisbury, Wiltshire.
Published in the New York World on November 8, 9, 10 and 12
1894, and the Pall Mall Gazette on November 14 and 15 with
illustrations by Cecil Aldin. In the Pall Mall Gazette the poem
"A Ripple Song" was printed as a heading, with the word
'Translation' below; it was placed after the story in book form.
Collected in The Second Jungle Book in 1895. One night an
Adjutant-crane, a jackal, and a huge old man-eating mugger
(crocodile) are gossiping on a river bank below a new railway
bridge. The mugger reminisces of the villagers he used to catch
and devour in the old days, when they had to wade across through
a ford, and the time of the 'Indian Mutiny', when many bodies of
dead English floated down the stream, so many that they touched
each other, and the mugger 'got his girth'. He remembers a boat
coming down with a white child in the bows trailing little hands
in the water, closing his jaws but mis