RUDYARD KIPLING:

ling had heavier metal in readiness to follow up this first attack, and almost immediately the boo-stalls were stacked with green paper-backed pamphlets, looking shabby and weary as colonial books have a way of looking, bearing such titles as "Soldiers Three," "Under the Deodars," "Black and White," "The Story of the Gadsbys." Thus it was that all the work at the back of "Departmental Ditties," all the prodigious precocity of experience, told. It was when we read "the little green books' that we understood what Sir William Hunter meant.

was verse

Now "Departmental Ditties strictly "for those whom it might concern "'; that is, for those whose lot was cast among the humours and chicaneries of Anglo-Indian officialdom. We can imagine them enjoying the hits huge.y, as they read them week by week in various Indian papers. So do lawyers chuckle over the wicked little verses in The Law Times. The laughter which

greets the "departmental" is necessarily limited in area, but it is proportionally hearty. And Mr. Kipling's first business was to win the laugh, or the tear, nearest to him.

The reader will remember the vivid picture of an Indian provincial newspaper office which occurs in "The Man who Would

be King." As it was under the conditions there described that "Departmental Ditties" came into being, a quotation from that story will not be out of place:

"One Saturday night it was my pleasant duty to put the paper to bed alone.' A King or courtier or a courtesan or a Community was going to die or get a new Constitution, or do something that was important on the other side of the world, and the paper was to be held open till the latest possible minute in order to catch the telegram.

It was a pitchy black night, as stifling

as a June night can be, and the loo, the redhot wind from the westward, was booming among the tinder-dry trees and pretending that the rain was on its heels. Now and again a spot of almost boiling water would fall on the dust with the flop of a frog, but all our weary world knew that was only pretence. It was a shade cooler in the pressroom than the office, so I sat there, while the type ticked and clicked, and the nightjars hooted at the windows, and the all but naked compositors wiped the sweat from their foreheads, and called for water. The thing that was keeping us back, whatever it was, would not come off, though the lo dropped and the last type was set, and the whole round earth stood still in the choking heat, with its finger on its lip, to wait the event. I drowsed, and wondered whether the telegraph was a blessing, and whether this dying man, or struggling people, might be aware of the inconvenience the delay was causing. There was no special reason be

yond the heat and worry to make tension, but, as the clock-hands crept up to three o'clock, and the machines spun their flywheels two or three times to see that all was in order before I said the word that would set them off, I could have shrieked aloud."

To this it will be interesting to add something from Mr. Kipling's own account of the birth of his "little brown baby," contributed to The Idler a few years ago:

"As there is only one man in charge of a steamer, so there is but one man in charge of a newspaper, and he is the editor. My chief taught me this on an Indian journal, and he further explained that an order was an order, to be obeyed at a run, not a walk, and that any notion or notions as to the fitness or unfitness of any particular kind of work for the young had better be held over till the last page was locked up to press.

8.

RUDYARD KIPLING:

He was breaking me into harness, and I owe him a deep debt of gratitude, which I did not discharge at the time. The path of virtue was very steep, whereas the writing of verses allowed a certain play to the mind, and, unlike the filling in of reading matter, could be done as the spirit served. Now, a sub-editor is not hired to write verses: he is paid to sub-edit. At the time, this discovery shocked me greatly. This is a digression, as all my verses were digressions from office work. They came without invitation, unmanneredly, in the nature of things; but they had to come, and the writing out of them kept me healthy and amused. To the best of my remembrance, no one then discovered their grievous cynicism, or their pessimistic tendency, and I was far too busy, and too happy, to take thought about these things. So they arrived merrily, being born out of the life about me, and they were very bad indeed, and the joy of doing them was payment