r stories,
the 'White Seal' and the 'Undertakers' and their companions, stand on a
lower level; they are good stories, no doubt,--very good, indeed, one or
two of them. But they have an added importance in that they seem to have
been the needful accompaniment of the Mowgli tales; they may be
considered as the underbrush that at first protected the growth of the
loftier tree.

They are modern examples of the beast-fable, latter-day amplifications
of the simple tale of animals credited with human cunning, such as
primitive man told to his naked children as they huddled around the
embers in the cave, which was then their only home. The beast-fable is a
literary pattern of an undiscoverable antiquity, as alluring to-day as
ever before, since the child in us fortunately never dies. It is a
pattern which Mr. Kipling has handled with a constant affection and with
a large freedom. His earlier animal tales dealt with wild beasts, or at
least with the creatures of the forests and of the ocean beyond the
influence of man and remote from his haunts. Soon he availed himself of
the same pattern to tell stories of animals domesticated and in close
contact with man; and thus he gave us the 'Walking Delegate' and the
'Maltese Cat.' In time betook a further step and applied to the iron
horse of the railroad the method which had enabled him to set before us
the talk of the polo pony and of the blooded trotter; and thus he was
led to compose '007,' in which we see the pattern of the primitive
beast-fable so stretched as to enable us to overhear the intimate
conversation of humanized locomotives, the steeds of steel that puff and
pant in and out of the roundhouse in an American railroad yard. Yet one
more extension of the pattern enabled him to take a final step; after
having given a human soul to separate engines, he proceeded then to
animate the several parts of a single machine. And thus we have 'How the
Ship Found Herself' and the later 'Below the Mill-dam.' But altho these
are successive stages of the primitive beast-fable as it has been
modified in Mr. Kipling's restless hands, there is little flagrant
originality, even at the end, since 'How the Ship Found Herself' is seen
to be only an up-to-date version of one of the earliest fables, the
'Belly and the Members.'

Interesting as it may be to clamber up into the spreading family-tree of
fiction, it is not here that we must seek for the stem from which the
Mowgli stories ultimately