and plays hell with his notions of duty-and superadded considerable coarse abuse of woman in general. This hurt her, but did not help things forward. It is characteristic of Rudyard Kipling that even here he gives women-no favour, but a fair field. He makes a weighty speech against marriage, not against wives. For certain disadvantages frequently attached to them they are at present no more justly blameable than for the colour of their eyes. It is by the ample recognition accorded to this fact, the dreary sense of the inevitable, that "The Swelling of Jordan" does its work so keenly.

Any other writer would have spoilt the book by concluding with Minnie's recovery. First, because it would not have occurred to him to carry out with such grim force the study of a man marred; and secondly, because in his eagerness for a happy ending, he would have declared Nemesis satisfied over soon. The "Shadow of Death" has blotted out the "Shadowy Third"; Gadsby has undergone anguish enough; let him alone! But he is not let alone. His nerve is shattered, his spirits broken utterly; and the one to work this is the girl-wife who loves him. So a weary equation works out; "and that is the end of the story of the Gadsbys." The tragedy is so haunting, so miserable, one would fain file a small protest. There is surely some discrepancy between the spirited, capable, quick-witted little girl who insulted Pip's moustache and his unreliable blunt-witted wife. Minnie, as she appears in the first scene, would never have dreamt of allowing her husband to cut the service. Even the Minnie of the last scene would not have done so, had Mafflin but pocketed pride and politeness-no great matter in such urgency-to give her the tiniest hint of his chum's misery. Let us, therefore, find comfort in the sudden leap to burlesque taken by the Envoi in its last stanza; highly unexpected conduct on the part of so grave and polished a piece of verse.

Taking one consideration with another, an Anglo-Indian's life does not appear a happy one. He cannot enjoy himself anywhere but at Simla, and there he frequently takes his pleasure full sadly. Jack Pansay, for instance, cannot be said to have had hilariously good times in the Hills. All the gaiety is conducted like the feast of the White Hussars, with the shadow of a coffin on the suppertable. The men's work is too hard to be done half-heartedly; but they do it with a sense of total alienism weighing them down. They wear themselves out to anglicise Asia, knowing at heart that Asia is entirely ungrateful, and will revert to all her good old ways at the earliest possible moment. And her ways are ways of darkness. Englishmen in India must ceaselessly crush down a maddening

terror of her limitless capability for cruelty and sorcery. A few like Strickland can keep their heads and derive interesting occupation from the examination of this elderly, ugly, unchangeable sphinx of silence; but the rest find it weary work, even if they are Viceroys. Still they do not seem, as we at home are apt to imagine them, constantly to stand in expectation of another mutiny. Rudyard Kipling only alludes once, and then in rhetorical fashion, to that possibility,

Of woe the years bring forth,

Of our galley swamped and shattered in the rollers of the north,
When the niggers break the hatches and the decks are gay with gore,
And a craven-hearted pilot crams her crashing on the shore.

The characters of the native tales are entertaining, but detestable. That is to say, the men. They do not know what pity or unselfishness mean; they do not want to know. They do know a colossal amount of devilry which their rulers cannot get at. Their stolid fatalism gives them a natural advantage over people with live brains and nerves, and so does their gigantic untruthfulness over people to whom "liar" seems a disgraceful word. It is a relief to get on the frontier and see some good straight fights. One cannot like these Indians, and were their country the Garden of Eden one could not like that. Again, nobody seems to care anything for scenery which is not located in the Himalayas ; and the deodars whisper mostly of grief and death. Rudyard Kipling has a light hand with nature; he always contrives to endue the story in hand with its own particular atmosphere. You can, for instance, thoroughly sympathise with the man who said "Thank God!" at the first sound of the rains. Aurelian McGoggin snubbed him for it; a piece of such gratuitous ungraciousness, that one is very glad that he in his turn received the most superb snub in history.

It is usual to say that Rudyard Kipling has given us no woman to love. Were this true, it would not materially affect the creation of Bobby Wick and little Mildred and Mottram and Deecy and Ouless and Jack Barrett. But such is not the case. Rarely in the book-world does one encounter such genuinely attractive and interesting maidens as Edith Copleigh and May Holt. Their thorough vitality renders our single glimpse of each more valuable than libraries full of the brainless, bloodless puppets, which so wearily often do duty for girls. These wholly possible shes can move hearts filled with contempt and loathing of the average novel heroine. A young lady with a sense of humour, and a mutinous disposition, forms a truly refreshing spectacle; doubly so a young

VOL. CCLXXIII.

NO. 1940.

L

lady in love on her own account, and as many fathoms deep as Rosalind. The Hawley Boy's sweet sweetheart forms an object of parental anxiety to more than Mrs. Hauksbee. One shares in the universal excitement as the two riders draw nearer on the pineshadowed road, encompassed by all earth and sky aroused and at watch. The stirring of the dead as May's fate grows big, is a stroke of genius. The infinitely mournful and musical pleading of their response to the graveyard pines forms a weird contrast to the irresponsible might of "the little blind devil of Chance."

THE PINES:

Lie still, lie still! O earth to earth returning,
Brothers beneath, what wakes you to your pain?

THE DEAD:

Earth's call to earth--the old unstifled yearning
To clutch our lives again.

By summer shrivelled and by winter frozen,
Ye cannot thrust us wholly from the light,
Do we not know who were of old his chosen,
Love rides abroad to-night?

By all that was our own of joy or sorrow,

By pain fordone, desire snatched away,
By hopeless weight of that unsought To-morrow,
Which is our lot to-day.

By vigil in our chambers ringing hollow,

With Love's foot overhead to mock our dearth,

We, who have come, would speak for those who follow-
Be pitiful, O Earth!

She is a much

At first sight Edith cannot compare with May. slighter portrait, merely one of the ingredients in an incident. But the girl is human to her finger-tips and impressive in the depth of despair she bore so gamely. The graphic vividness of that picnic's chronicle is unsurpassable. The strain and darkness of the dust. storm affect not only the people in it, but the people who read about them. One feels as limp as the narrator at Saumarez's distracted, "I've proposed to the wrong one! What on earth shall I do?" The "creepiness" of Edith's "little low voice, saying quietly to itself, 'Oh, my God!' as if a lost soul were flying about in the storm "; the hurried chase of her, and the petulant misery of the words she flung back, "Go away! I'm going home. Oh, go away!" the way in which, breaking down at the revulsion she disclosed her whole trouble to a surface acquaintance, and so shaken were both that they thought it a perfectly rational conversation; one

can follow it all as if one had been present, and would dearly like to make one in the circle of white-faced men and women, who stood round clapping as if they were at a theatre, when Edith dropped from her horse into her lover's arms. But even then you wonder what became of Maud Copleigh, without help or hope in her thrice bitter pain. The man from India has a trick of leaving his women stories off in the middle. What did Georgina do when she had cried till she could cry no more? Did she kill herself—or Georgie Porgie? Did she get back to Burmah? Did she by any chain of events come to speech of the Bride? I am entirely unable to settle these questions. Had little Bisesa to drag out a lifetime in mutilation? Did the miserable heroine of "The Hill of Illusion," verily, go into outer darkness, knowing the horror of night? What of Harriet Heriot's ruined life? Must Maisie go all her days with no friend at all, except the red-haired girl? Cholera of course arranged matters finally for Ameera; but the pretence made at ending leaves Emma Boulte's ultimate action more indecisive than ever. Did she never come very certainly to the conclusion that her existence was unendurable? Did Mrs. Vansuythen never cry out to her husband to take her away? She should become immortal, should that soundhearted beauty; for she has endowed her language with a brand new epithet, containing the essence of several volumes. It is remarkably simply and remarkably effective.

"Well!" said Kurrell, brutally, "it seems to me Mrs. Boulte had better be fond of her husband first."

"Stop!" said Mrs. Vansuythen, “hear me first. I don't know. I don't want to know anything about you and Mrs. Boulte; but I want you to know that I hate you, that I think you're a cur, and that I'll never, never speak to you again. Oh, I don't dare to say what I think of you, you-man!"

Remains Lucy Hauksbee. It is not of the slightest use to argue about the "little thin, brown, almost skinny woman, with big violet eyes, and the sweetest manners in the world." She is bound to impress you very strongly in one of two ways. You must either fall down and worship, or stand aloof in staggered disapprobation, not unmixed with fear. If in the latter frame of mind, you will call her vulgar, fast, frisky, and cartloads of other pretty names; if in the former you will say with the Hawley Boy, "God save her Imperial Majesty!" My sentiments.

Good wine needs no bush, and "Soldiers Three" no advertisement. The miraculous grasp of character evinced in Kipling's studies of Thomas Atkins, private of the line, calls forth admiration,

whether you will or no.
Andrew Lang put the case in a nutshell
when he remarked that nobody ever thought of telling us these
things before. It is all so completely new, so well told, so strange,
and so life-like. In men of war Rudyard Kipling finds most con-
genial matter, even when he is not talking of the three musketeers.
He and Mulvaney are in their element when war legends come to
the fore; witness the square in the desert, the scrimmage in the
blocked gorge, the terrible history of how the Fore and Fit became
the Fore and Aft. The soldier songs are delightful. They all
possess an inimitable flavour which does not appear everywhere in
our author's verse. It is all as good as it can be, but it is not all
Kipling. Oh, that he would complete those delicious, aggravating
morsels which precede the short stories! It is dreadful to read three
or four lines, just enough to set one agog for the whole poem, and
then alas-to find there is no more.. Divers among his finished
pieces are not so precious as these irritating scraps. But one and
all own the merits of perfect music and polish, and as much force as
can be crammed into them. This perhaps was to be expected from
a man who can write blank verse in a style of his own. Every word
tells. It would be impossible to excel the grace of such poems as
"The Plea of the Simla Dancers," "Christmas in India," the Envoi
to "Life's Handicap," and "The Song of the Women," the only
laudatory poem ever written during its addressee's lifetime which is
worth anything whatever. In the works of what Old Master will you
find nineteen words more skilfully chosen and more quietly effective
than these?

Say that we be a feeble folk who greet her,
But old in grief and very wise in tears.

It is hard to say whether the curt grim power of such phrases shows best in his prose or his verse. "The Story of Uriah" stands almost unrivalled in its terse significance, even by its own author; but that is a short story in rhyme and belongs to both divisions. Pray you, list to the last two of its five verses:

Jack Barrett's bones at Quetta

Enjoy profound repose,
But I shouldn't be astonished

If now his spirit knows

The reason of his transfer

From the Himalayan snows.

And when the Last Great Bugle Call
Adown the Hurnai throbs,

When the last grim joke is written

In the big black Book of Jobs,