y king, who after much
amazement and wrath concludes that the English are not a modern people
and thereafter returns to his own more reasonable land.

Of the miscellaneous stories in which Mr Kipling surrenders utterly to
this later theme perhaps the most memorable is _An Habitation Enforced_
from _Actions and Reactions_. Here we are in quite another plane of
authorship from that in which we have moved in the tales of India.
There is a wide difference between _The Return of Imray_--to take one
of the most skilful tales of India--and _An Habitation Enforced_. _The
Return of Imray_ betrays the conscious resolution of a clever man of
letters to make the most effective use of good material. But _An
Habitation Enforced_ is the spontaneous gesture of pure feeling. The
Indian stories are ingenious and well managed. Their point is made.
Their workmanship is excellent. Atmospheres and impressions are
cunningly arranged. But they very rarely succeed in carrying the
reader as the reader is carried upon this later tide.

The feeling of _An Habitation Enforced_, as of all the English tales,
is that of the traveller returned. The value of Mr Kipling's traffics
and discoveries over the seven seas is less in the record he has made
of these adventures than in their having enabled him to return to
England with eyes sharpened by exile, with his senses alert for that
fourth dimension which does not exist for the stranger. _An Habitation
Enforced_ is inspired by the nostalgia of inveterate banishment. Some
part of its perfection--it is one of the few perfect short stories in
the English tongue--is due to the perfect agreement of its form with
the passion that informs its writing. It is the story of a homing
Englishwoman, and of her restoration to the absolute earth of her
forbears. In writing of this woman Mr Kipling has only had to recall
his own joyful adventure in picking up the threads of a life at once
familiar and mysterious, in meeting again the homely miracle of things
that never change. Finally England claims her utterly--her and her
children and her American husband. It was an American who bade Cloke,
man of the soil and acquired retainer of the family, bring down
larch-poles for a light bridge over the brook; but it was an Englishman
reclaimed who needs consented to Cloke's amendment:

"'But where the deuce are the larch-poles, Cloke? I told you to have
them down here ready.'

"'We'll get 'em down _if_ you, s