pretending to be a whit better than you; probably I am worse in many
ways, but not in your way. Putting it merely as a matter of taste,
I don't like the way. It makes me sick--that is all. It is a sin
which I can comfortably damn, as I am not inclined to it. You may
put it in that light; and I have no way of converting you, nor, if I
have not dissuaded you, of dissuading you, from continuing, on a
larger scale, your practices in The Bull-dog.



MR. KIPLING'S STORIES



The wind bloweth where it listeth. But the wind of literary
inspiration has rarely shaken the bungalows of India, as, in the
tales of the old Jesuit missionaries, the magical air shook the
frail "medicine tents," where Huron conjurors practised their
mysteries. With a world of romance and of character at their doors,
Englishmen in India have seen as if they saw it not. They have been
busy in governing, in making war, making peace, building bridges,
laying down roads, and writing official reports. Our literature
from that continent of our conquest has been sparse indeed, except
in the way of biographies, of histories, and of rather local and
unintelligible facetiae. Except the novels by the author of "Tara,"
and Sir Henry Cunningham's brilliant sketches, such as "Dustypore,"
and Sir Alfred Lyall's poems, we might almost say that India has
contributed nothing to our finer literature. That old haunt of
history, the wealth of character brought out in that confusion of
races, of religions, and the old and new, has been wealth untouched,