the Hills, living in a little shrine with the friendly creatures of the
woods, venerated and cared for by a village on the hillside.

All Mr Kipling's readers know how that story ends--how on a night of
disaster there came together as of one blood the saint and his people
and the wild creatures who had housed with him. It is quoted here as
showing how the old piety of India beckoned Mr Kipling into the jungle
as inevitably as the old loyalty of England beckoned him into a region
where on a summer day we can meet without surprise a Flint Man or a
Centurion of Rome.

Always the bent of Mr Kipling, in his best work, is found to be away
from the world. To appreciate his finer quality we must pass with him
into the Rukh, or into the country beyond Policeman Day, into the
mansion of lost children, or into a region where it is but a step from
the Zodiac to fields under the plough. The tales of Mr Kipling which
will longest survive him are not the tales where he is competently
brutal and omniscient, but the tales where he instinctively flies from
the necessity of giving to his vision the likeness of the modern world.

We may now realise more clearly the peril which lies in the popular
fallacy concerning Mr Kipling described in the first few pages of this
book. So far is Mr Kipling from being an author inspired and driven to
claim a share in the active life of the present, an author who unloads
upon us a store of memories and experience, that he is only able to do
his finest work as an unchecked and fantastic dreamer. The stories in
which he imposes upon his readers the illusion that he would never have
written books if he had stayed at home, that his stories are the
carelessly flung reminiscences of a full life--these stories are
themselves instances of the skill whereby a cunning author has been