fever, my child!'

"'What said Imray Sahib?'

"'He said he was a handsome child and patted him on the head; wherefore
my child died. Wherefore I killed Imray Sahib in the twilight, when he
had come, and was sleeping. Wherefore I dragged him up into the
roof-beams and made all fast behind him--the Heaven-born knows all
things. I am the servant of the Heaven-born. . . . Be it remembered
that the Sahib's shirts are correctly enumerated, and that there is an
extra piece of soap in his wash-basin. My child was bewitched and I
slew the wizard.'"


There is here just that blend of simplicity and incalculable darkness
found in all Mr Kipling's native tales. If the premises of life in
India are tortuous, conduct and reasoning are as naïvely innocent as a
problem in geometry.

It follows that, when the devils are out of the story, no story
breathes more delightfully of Eden than a story of the East. The white
side of the black story of Imray Sahib is shown in _Kim_, and in all
the hints and small studies for _Kim_ that preceded Mr Kipling's best
of all Indian tales.

But _Kim_ is something of a paradox. It is the best of all Indian
tales by virtue of qualities which have little to do with India. It is
an Indian book only upon its least important side. It is true that Kim
himself is upon one side the most cunning of Mr Kipling's studies of
the meeting of East and West; but that, for us, is not his final merit.