ion, the "Taking of Lungtung Pen," and the "Drums of the Fore and
Aft," and that other tale of the battle with the Pathans in the gorge,
are among the good fights of fiction. They stir the spirit, and they
should be distributed (in addition, of course, to the "Soldier's Pocket
Book") in the ranks of the British army. Mr. Kipling is as well informed
about the soldier's women-kind as about the soldier: about Dinah Shadd as
about Terence Mulvaney. Lever never instructed us on these matters:
Micky Free, if he loves, rides away; but Terence Mulvaney is true to his
old woman. Gallant, loyal, reckless, vain, swaggering, and
tender-hearted, Terence Mulvaney, if there were enough of him, "would
take St. Petersburg in his drawers." Can we be too grateful to an author
who has extended, as Mr. Kipling in his military sketches has extended,
the frontiers of our knowledge and sympathy?

It is a mere question of individual taste; but, for my own part, had I to
make a small selection from Mr. Kipling's tales, I would include more of
his studies in Black than in White, and many of his excursions beyond the
probable and natural. It is difficult to have one special favourite in
this kind; but perhaps the story of the two English adventurers among the
freemasons of unknown Kafiristan (in the "Phantom Rickshaw") would take a
very high place. The gas-heated air of the Indian newspaper office is so
real, and into it comes a wanderer who has seen new faces of death, and
who carries with him a head that has worn a royal crown. The contrasts
are of brutal force; the legend is among the best of such strange
fancies. Then there is, in the same volume, "The Strange Ride of
Morrowbie Jukes," the most dreadful nightmare of the most awful Bunker in
the realms of fancy. This is a very early work; if nothing else of Mr.
Kipling's existed, his memory might live by it, as does the memory of the
American Irishman by the "Diamond Lens." The sham magic of "In the House
of Suddhu" is as terrible as true necromancy could be, and I have a
_faiblesse_ for the "Bisara of Pooree." "The Gate of the Hundred
Sorrows" is a realistic version of "The English Opium Eater," and more
powerful by dint of less rhetoric. As for the sketches of native
life--for example, "On the City Wall"--to English readers they are no
less than revelations. They testify, more even than the military
stories, to the author's swift and certain vision, his certainty in his
effects.