round hoping that presently he will do the same again. Ambrose Bierce
could have made something of what is suggested in such a passage as
this:

"On the borders of this horrid desolation (the Somme) we met a
Salvage Company at work. That warren of trenches and dugouts
extended for untold miles.... They warned us, if we insisted on
going further in, not to let any man go singly, but only in strong
parties, as the Golgotha was peopled with wild men, British,
French, Australian, German deserters, who lived there underground,
like ghouls among the mouldering dead, and who came out at nights
to plunder and kill. In the night, an officer said, mingled with
the snarling of carrion dogs, they often heard inhuman cries and
rifle-shots coming from that awful wilderness. Once they (the
Salvage Company) had put out, as a trap, a basket containing food,
tobacco, and a bottle of whisky. But the following morning they
found the bait untouched, and a note in the basket, 'Nothing
doing!'"

XXX. Kipling

JUNE 5, 1920. One day, when I did not know Kipling's name, I found in a
cabin of a ship from Rangoon two paper-covered books, with a Calcutta
imprint, smelling of something, whatever it was, that did not exist in
England. The books were _Plain Tales from the Hills_ and _Soldiers
Three_. It was high summer, and in that cabin of a ship in the Albert
Dock, with its mixed odour of tea, teak, and cheroots, I read through
all. The force in those stories went nearer to capturing me completely
than anything I have read since. I can believe now that I just escaped
taking a path which would have given me a world totally different from
the one I know, and the narrowness of the escape makes me feel tolerant
towards the young people who give up typewriting and book-keeping, and go
out into an unfriendly world determined to be Mary Pickfords and Charlie
Chaplins. A boy boards a ship merely to get a parrot, and his friend, who
brought it from Burma, has gone to Leadenhall Street; there is a long
interval, with those books lying in a bunk. Such a trivial
incident--something like it happening every week to everybody--and to-day
that boy, but for the Grace of God, might be reading the leaders of the
_Morning Post_ as the sole relief to a congested mind, going every week
to the cartoon of _Punch_ as to barley water for chronic prickly heat,
and talking of dealing with the heterodox as the Holy Office used to deal
wi