"The Head of the District" Notes on the text These notes, by John McGivering, are partly new, and partly based on the ORG. The page and line numbers below refer to the Macmillan (London) Standard Edition of Life's Handicap, as published and frequently reprinted between 1891 and 1950.

The following information has been gathered on the internet, and also with the considerable help of two Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens, 1835-1910) experts at the Universities of Tarleton (TX) and of Berkeley (CA). I had first thought that Twain might have been the originator of the phrase, but this is now very doubtful. The phrase, “small potatoes”, has been used in America since before 1831 and is similar in meaning to “small beer” in England, ie. 'not of great account'. The phrase ‘small potatoes, with few in the hill’ is recorded in Mitford Mathews’ Dictionary of Americanisms and was apparently proverbial as early as 1831. It is used in 1843 as a chapter heading in The Attaché: or Sam Slick in England by Thomas Chandler Haliburton, a Nova Scotian judge (1796-1865). There is also a report on a "Democratic Meeting at Hayes' Park" by Mark Twain in the San Francisco Daily Morning Call of 3 August 1864, which also uses this part of the phrase. It is known that Twain had read at least one of the six “Slick” books. (http://www.twainquotes.com/18640803d.html)

Through the internet we have located an undated, unattributed cutting, surrounded by others in a scrapbook from the 1880s, which comes from the one of the three U.S. counties of Bradford (PA), Tioga (PA), or Chemung (NY), in the last of which is the town of Elmira. This cutting begins 'Man that is born of woman is small potatoes and few in the hill', exactly as used by Kipling. (http://www.rootsweb.com/~srgp/clippings/tcobit31.htm).

At first, the cutting (Click here for the full text) reads like a modern spoof on the burial service with a reference to: '. . . in the bright sunlight to absorb ozone.' However, on further investigation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla), it seems that Twain was a great admirer of Dr Nikola Tesla, a physicist and an electrical engineer, who amongst his other successes, developed an ozone generating device. Twain and Tesla became friends in the early 1890s, but unfortunately this doesn’t confirm that Twain was the author of the piece. It is not recorded in the Twain bibliography, and it has been suggested to me that the cutting reads like a typical newspaper humour paragraph of the mid-nineteenth century. In Melville Landon's Wit and Humor of the Age (1886), there is a very similar biblical parody ("Man, born of woman, is few of days and no teeth...") by the humorist Robert J. Burdette (1844-1914), who was one of Twain's cronies.

There are many places in which Kipling could have come across the phrase before writing this story, but it would be pure speculation to try and identify one of them from the information currently available. [D.P. May 2006].

... Mowgli had not the faintest idea of the difference that caste makes between man and man. When the potter’s donkey slipped in the clay-pit, Mowgli hauled it out by the tail, and helped to stack the pots for their journey to the market at Khanhiwara. That was very shocking, too, for the potter is a low-caste man, and his donkey is worse.