the
old-fashioned among his readers begun to show signs of nervousness than
he would suddenly feel in the mood for a tune on his Old Testament harp,
and, taking it down, would twang from its strings a lay of duty. "Take
up," he would sing--

Take up the White Man's burden,
Send forth the best ye breed,
Go, bind your sons to exile,
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

Little Willie, in the tracts, scarcely dreamed of a thornier path of
self-sacrifice. No wonder the sentimentalists were soon all dancing to
the new music--music which, perhaps, had more of the harmonium than the
harp in it, but was none the less suited on that account to its
revivalistic purpose.

At the same time, much as we may have been attracted to Mr. Kipling in
his Sabbath moods, it was with what we may call his Saturday night moods
that he first won the enthusiasm of the young men. They loved him for
his bad language long before he had ever preached a sermon or written a
leading article in verse. His literary adaptation of the unmeasured talk
of the barrack-room seemed to initiate them into a life at once more
real and more adventurous than the quiet three-meals-a-day ritual of
their homes. He sang of men who defied the laws of man; still more
exciting, he sang of men who defied the laws of God. Every oath he
loosed rang heroically in the ear like a challenge to the universe; for
his characters talked in a daring, swearing fashion that was new in
literature. One remembers the bright-eyed enthusiasm with which very
young men used to repeat to each other lines like the one in _The Ballad
of "The Bolivar_," which runs--

Boys, the wheel has gone to Hell--rig the winches aft!

Not that anybody knew, or cared, what "rigging the winches aft" meant.
It was the familiar and fearless commerce with hell that seemed to give
literature a new: horizon. Similarly, it was the eternal flames in the
background that made the tattered figure of Gunga Din, the
water-carrier, so favourite a theme with virgins and boys. With what
delight they would quote the verse:--

So I'll meet 'im later on,
At the place where 'e is gone--
Where it's always double drill and no canteen;
'E'll be squattin' on the coals,
Givin' drink to poor damned souls.
An' I'll get a swig in hell from Gunga Din!