The first and best story in _The Day's Work_ at once introduces the
theme which threads all the best work of Mr Kipling. _The
Bridge-Builders_ is the story of a Bridge and incidentally of the men
who built it. The crown has yet to be set upon a long agony of toil
and disappointment. The master builder of the Bridge has put the prime
of his energy and will into its building. Now it stands all but
complete, with the Ganges gathering in her upper reaches for a mighty
effort to throw off her strange fetters. The Bridge before the night
of the flood has passed away becomes the symbol of a wrestle between
the most ancient gods and the young will of man. Mr Kipling has put
the Bridge into the foreground of his picture, has made of it the
really sentient figure of the tale. Here definitely he writes the
first chapter of his book of steam and steel; and we begin to be aware
of an enthusiasm which is lacking in many of the highly finished proofs
which preceded it that Mr Kipling could write almost anything as well
as almost anybody else. In _The Day's Work_ he passes into a province
which he was insistently urged to occupy by right of inspiration.

_The Day's Work_ brings us directly into touch with one of the most
distinctive features of Mr Kipling's method. He has never been able to
resist the lure of things technical. If he writes of a horse he must
write as though he had bred and sold horses all his life. If he writes
of a steam-engine he must write as though he had spent his life among
pistons and cylinders. He writes of ships and the sea, of fox-hunting,
of the punishing of Pathans, of drilling by companies and of
agriculture; and he writes as one from whom no craft could hide its
mysteries. This fascination of mere craft, this delight in the
technicalities and dialect of the world's work, is not a mannerism. It
is not a parade of omniscience or the madness of a note-book worm. It
is fundamental in Mr Kipling. It is wrong to think of _Between the