V: Her rig was strange, her name unknown, she came we know not whence,

But on the flag at her peak we read "The Drums of the Fore and Aft." And I speak for one-my breath came thick and my pulse beat hard and tense, And we cheered with tears of splendid joy at sight of the splendid craft.

VI.

She swept us by; her master came and spoke us from the side,

We knew our elder, though his beard was scarce yet fully grown;

She spanked for home through churning foam with favouring wind and tide,

And while we hailed like mad he sailed, a King, to take his own.

Some men are born rich, and some are born lucky, and some are born both to luck and riches. Kipling is one of the last. Nature endowed him with uncommon qualities, and circumstance sent him into the sphere in which those qualities could be most fortunately exercised. It seems strange that the great store of treasure which he opened to us should have been unhandled and unknown so long. His Indian pictures came like a revelation. It is always so when a man of real genius dawns upon the world. It was so when Scott shewed men and women the jewelled mines of romance which lay in the highways and by-ways of homely Scotland. It was so when Dickens bared the Cockney hearth to the sight of all men. Meg Merrilies, and Rob Roy, and Edie Ochiltree were all there the wild, the romantic, the humourous were at the doors of millions of men before Scott saw them. In London, in the early days of Dickens, there were hordes of capable writers eager for something new. Not one of them saw Bob Cratchit, or Fagin, or the Marchioness until Dickens saw them. So, in India, the British Tommy had lived for many a year, and the jungle beasts were there, and Government House and its society were there. and capable men went up and down the land, sensible of its charms, its wonder, its remoteness from themselves, and yet not discerning truly. At last, when a thousand feet have trodden upon a

thing of inestimable price, there comes along a newspaper man, doing the driest kind of hackwork, bound to a drudgery as stale and dreary as any in life, and he sees what no other man has ever seen before him, though it has been plain in view for years and years. Through scorn and discouragement and contumely he polishes his treasure, in painful hours snatched from distasteful labour, and at last he brings it where it can be seen and known for what it is.

It is only genius which owns the seeing eye. There are in Great Britain to-day a dozen writers of fine faculty, trained to observe, trained to give to observation its fullest artistic result; and they are all panting for something new. The something new is under their noses.

They see it and touch it every day. If I could find it, my name in a year would sail over the seas, and I should be a great personage. But I shall not find it. None of the men who are now known will find it. It is always the unknown man who makes that sort of discovery. He will come in time, and when he comes we shall wonder and admire, and say: "How new! How true!" Why, in that very matter of Tommy Atkins, whose manifold portraits have done as much as anything to endear Kipling to the English people-it is known to many that in my own foolish youth I enlisted in the army. I lived with Tommy. I fought and chaffed and drank and drilled and marched, and went "up tahn" with him, and did pack drill, and had C. B. with him. I turned novel-writer afterwards, and never so much as dreamt of giving Tommy a place in my pages. Then comes Kipling, not knowing him one half as well in one way, and knowing him a thousand times better in another way, and makes a noble and beautiful and merited reputation out of him, shows the man inside the military toggery, and makes us laugh and cry, and exult with feeling. There was a man in New South Wales-ashepherd-who went raving mad when he learnt that the heavy black dust which spoilt his pasture was tin, and that he

had waked and slept for years without discovering the gigantic fortune which was all about him. I will not go mad, if I can help it, but I do think it rather hard lines on me that I hadn't the simple genius to see what lay in Tommy.

A good deal has been said of the occasional coarseness of Kipling's pages. There are readers who find it offensive, and they have every right to the expression of their feelings. I confess to having been startled once or twice, but never in a wholly disagreeable fashion -never as "Jude the Obscure" startled. Poor Captain Mayne Reid, who is still beloved by here and there a schoolboy, wrote a preface to one of his books-I think "The Rifle Rangers," but it is years on years since I saw it-in order to put forth his defence for the introduction of an occasional oath or impious expletive in the conversation of his men of the prairies. pleaded necessity. It was impossible to pourtray his men without it. And he argued that an oath does not soil the mind "like the clinging immorality of an unchaste episode." The majority of Englishmen will agree with the gallant Captain. Kipling is rough at times, and daring, but he is always clean and honest. There are no hermaphroditic cravings after sexual excitment in him. He is too much of a man to care for that kind of thing.

He

What a benefactor an honest laughter-maker is! Since Dickens there has been nobody to fill our lungs like Kipling. Is it not better that the public should have "My Lord the Elephant" and "Brugglesmith" to laugh outright at, than that they should be feebly sniggering over the jest-books begotten on English Dulness by Yankee Humour, as they were eight or nine years ago? That jugful of Cockney skyblue, with a feeble dash of Mark Twain in it, which was called "Three Men in a Boat," was not a cheerful tipple for a mental bank holiday, but we poor moderns got no better till the coming of Kipling. We have a right to be grateful to the man who can make us laugh.

The thing which strikes everybody

who reads Kipling-and who does not? -is the truly astonishing range of his knowledge of technicalities. He is very often beyond me altogether, but I presume him to be accurate, because nobody finds him out, and that is a thing which specialists are so fond of doing that we may be sure they would have been about him in clouds if he had been vulnerable. He gives one the impression at times of being arrogant about this special fund of knowledge. But he nowhere cares to make his modesty conspicuous to the reader, and his cocksureness is only the obverse of his best literary virtue. It comes from the very crispness and definiteness with which he sees things. There are no clouds about the edges of his perceptions. They are all clear and nette. Things observed by such a man dogmatise to the mind, and it is natural that he should dogmatise as to what he sees with such apparent precision and completeness.

I

A recent writer, anonymous, but speaking from a respectable vehicle as platform, has told us that a short story is the highest form into which any expression of the art of fiction can be cast. This to me looks very like nonsense. do not know any short story which can take rank with "Pére Goriot," or "Vanity Fair," or "David Copperfield." The short story has charms of its own, and makes demands of its own. What those demands are only the writers who have subjected themselves to its tyranny can know. The ordinary man who tries this form of art finds early that he is emptying his mental pockets. Kipling's riches in this respect have looked as if they were without end, and no man before him has paid away so much. But it has to be remembered here that in many examples of his power in this way he has been purely episodic, and the discovery or creation of an episode is a much simpler thing than the discovery or creation of a story proper, which is a collection of episodes, arranged in close sequence, and leading to a catastrophe, tragic or comic, as the theme may determine.

In estimating the value of any writer's work you must take his range into consideration. Kipling sketches, in emotion, from deep seriousness to exuberant laughter; and his grasp of character is quite firm and sure, whether he deal with Mrs. Hawksbee or with Dinah Shadd; with a field officer or with Mulvaney, Ortheris and Learoyd; with the Inspector of Forests or with Mowgli. He knows the ways of thinking of them all, and he knows the tricks of speech of all, and the outer garniture and daily habitudes of all.

His mind seems furnished with an instantaneous camera and a phonographic recorder in combination; and keeping guard over this rare mental mechanism is a spirit of catholic affection and understanding.

Finally, he is an explorer, one of the original discoverers, one of the men who open new regions to our view. A revelation has waited for him. He is as much the master of his English compeers in originality as Stevenson was their master in finished craftsmanship.

ANSEN is a typical explorer physi

cally and mentally, one of a class whose occupation is yet far from gone, notwithstanding a very general impression to the contrary. An English scientist, Mr. Logan Lobley, at last Geographical Congress reckoned up the area of the world still awaiting the labour of adventurous spirits; and his grand total of 20,000,000 square miles, on a large part of which the foot of civilized man has not yet trod, is a startling result. Here, in the conquest of the earth's surface, is scope enough yet for all the energies of the advance guard of humanity. In the ranks of explorers have marched some of the most heroic figures the race has produced. Doubtless fresh openings for all the vital forces of mankind await us in the future, but we are yet far from ready to welcome the extinguishment of this form of enterprise.

Brigden.*

attracting involuntary attention. In a

crowd he is conspicuous, the commanding power and litheness of his form marking him out as a fit leader of men. The explorer is of Norwegian blood, with the fair hair and blue eyes of the pure Scandinavian. The kindliness which often characterizes the Northmen gives his face an amicable attractiveness, which suffers nothing from the force and firmness betokened by his massive jaw; while a good broad forehead, from which the fair hair is brushed straight back, gives the fin.sh to a countenance of clear intelligence.

A visitor to his home at Lysaker on a bitterly cold day, with the thermometer 9 degrees below zero, was startled to find Nansen on the railway platform, wearing no overcoat, but dressed simply in a light grey Ski uniform, and standing perfectly at ease among this fur-clad company. Indeed, with Nansen, at home, a top coat was a rare indulgence even in the depth of winter, but he might have been seen at times with one thrown across a shoulder, the long capes acting as a graceful drapery to his tall lithesome form. This disciplined power of enduring the rigours of a north

Nansen stands before us a fine specimen of heredity-a Viking worthy of his race. He is six feet high, with a finely proportioned physical development in which strength aad quickness are combined in an uncommon degree. His figure, with its long stride and swinging gait, can never pass without

*See also Frontispiece, for picture of Nansen.