Rudyard
Kipling have excited has naturally led to curiosity concerning their
author and to a desire to know the conditions of his life. Much has
been written about him which has had little or no foundation in truth.
It seems, then, worth while, in order to prevent false or mistaken
reports from being accepted as trustworthy, and in order to provide
for the public such information concerning Mr. Kipling as it has a
right to possess, that a correct and authoritative statement of the
chief events in his life should be given to it. This is the object of
the following brief narrative.

* * * * *

Rudyard Kipling was born at Bombay on the 30th of December, 1865. His
mother, Alice, daughter of the Rev. G. B. Macdonald, a Wesleyan
preacher, eminent in that denomination, and his father, John Lockwood
Kipling, the son also of a Wesleyan preacher, were both of Yorkshire
birth. They had been married in London early in the year, and they
named their first-born child after the pretty lake in Staffordshire
on the borders of which their acquaintance had begun. Mr. Lockwood
Kipling, after leaving school, had served his apprenticeship in one of
the famous Staffordshire potteries at Burslem, had afterward worked in
the studio of the sculptor, Mr. Birnie Philip, and from 1861 to 1865
had been engaged on the decorations of the South Kensington Museum.
During our American war and in the years immediately following, the
trade of Bombay was exceedingly flourishing, the city was immensely
prosperous, a spirit of inflation possessed the Government and the
people alike, there were great designs for the improvement and
rebuilding of large portions of the town, and a need was felt for
artistic oversight and direction of the works in hand and
contemplated. The distinction which Mr. Lockwood Kipling had already
won by his native ability and thorough training led to his being
appointed in 1865 to go to Bombay as the professor of Architectural
Sculpture in the British School of Art which had been established
there.

It was thus that Rudyard Kipling came to be born in the most
cosmopolitan city of the Eastern world, and it was there and in its
neighbourhood that the first three years of the boy's life were spent,
years in which every child receives ineffaceable impressions, shaping
his conceptions of the world, and in which a child of peculiarly
sensitive nature and active disposition, such as this boy possessed,
lies