of the life of a boy who is half Irish, half Indian, and therefore has two sides to his head.'

'Something I owe to the soil that grew;

More to the life that fed;

But most to Allah who gave me two
Separate sides to my head.

I would go without shirts or shoes,
Friends, tobacco, or bread,
Sooner than for an instant lose

Either side of my head.'

The story is nothing to speak of, and comes to an end, it seems, because it is long enough. Since the reader is carried along neither by dramatic plot nor by mental development, the book seems none too short, but it is full of lively pieces of description, and calls up the atmosphere of India. Many an old Anglo-Indian who has toiled and grumbled through his thirty years of India, and is now living horse-less and cramped in the dull air and dwarf houses of some London suburb, or amid the otiose platitudes of a provincial town, will sigh and wish himself once more young and in exile as he reads Mr Kipling's descriptions of the wide, free, simple, motley life of India. Once more he will wish he was riding through his district on a glorious December morning, and striking, perhaps, for a time into the stream of life on the Grand Trunk Road, where Kim went in company with the admirable lama from Ladakh, who was seeking a miraculous river.

The lama, as usual, was deep in meditation, but Kim's bright eyes were open wide. This broad, smiling river of life, he considered, was a vast improvement on the cramped and crowded Lahore streets. There were new people and new sights at every stride-castes he knew, and castes that were altogether out of his experience.'

Then follows an excellent description of the divers sorts of men and women and animals on the road, recalling Sir Walter Scott's vivid imagination of the gay and motley throng on the road to the festivities at Kenilworth. No wonder that the youthful Kim was in the seventh heaven of joy.'

"The Grand Trunk at this point was built on an embankment to guard against winter floods from the foot-hills, so

that one walked, as it were, a little above the country, along a stately corridor, seeing all India spread out to left and right. It was beautiful to behold the many-yoked grain and cotton waggons crawling over the country roads; one could hear their axles, complaining a mile away, coming nearer, till with shouts and yells and bad words they climbed up the steep incline and plunged on to the hard high-road, carter reviling carter. It was equally beautiful to watch the people, little clumps of red and blue and pink and white and saffron, turning aside to go to their own villages, dispersing and growing small by twos or threes across the level plain.'

And then, as the travellers reached the resting-place, came on the short magnificent glow when the Indian sky seems to compress into ten minutes all the diffused glory of an hour of northern sunset.

'By this time the sun was driving broad golden spokes through the lower branches of the mango-trees; the parakeets and the doves were coming home in their hundreds. . . Swiftly the light gathered itself together, painted for an instant the faces and the cart-wheels and the bullocks' horns as red as blood. Then the night fell, changing the touch of the air, drawing a low, even haze, like a gossamer veil of blue, across the face of the country, and bringing out, keen and distinct, the smell of wood-smoke and cattle and the good scent of wheaten cakes cooked on ashes.'

Nor will the old Anglo-Indian feel less the calling of the East' when he reads of Kim's wanderings in the hills. Glorious things did he afterwards see in Spiti and Kulu, but nothing is better than his first ascent from the plains made in company with Mahbub, the Pathan horse-dealer.

'It was all pure delight-the wandering road, climbing, dipping, and sweeping about the growing spurs; the flush of the morning laid along the distant snows; the branched cacti, tier upon tier on the stony hillsides; the voices of a thousand water-channels; the chatter of the monkeys; the solemn deodars, climbing one after another with down-drooped branches; the vista of the Plains rolled out far beneath them; the incessant twanging of the tonga-horns and the wild rush of the led horses when a tonga swung round a curve; the halts for prayers; ... the evening conferences by the haltingplaces, when camels and bullocks chewed solemnly together, and the stolid drivers told the news of the Road-all these things lifted Kim's heart to song within him.'

The truth is that with our railways we have ruined the joys of travel. Mail-coaches were almost as bad, and motor-cars will be no better. The pleasant days of travel were those which we had in England so long as the roads were but unmetalled tracks, when men went along on horseback or on foot, doing their ten to twenty miles a day, and could talk humanly to those whom they met, and see what a town looked like as they came near it. In modern India the railway-track is rapidly encroaching upon the old life of the highway, but great spaces are still left untouched; and there are still plenty of people who would rather walk a hundred miles than spend a rupee on a ticket. Even railway-travelling in India preserves something of the atmosphere of the road. The native is in no hurry; he does not look out trains in timetables, but sits at the station till a train appears. It is not uncommon in India to see a platform covered at night with sleeping figures, awaiting the morning train.

One is inclined to wish, if it is not too late, that Mr Kipling would cease to reside in America, or London, or South Africa, would abandon altogether the paths of the sea, and the attempt to reform the military administration by not very lucid or brilliant poems in the Times,' would cease to play what a critic lately called his rôle of Inspector-General of the British Empire, and would devote all the work of his remaining days to India. There is more of permanent interest there than in a hundred South Africas. A student of the ways of men might do far worse than live in a house high up in the pine-clad Himalaya hills, on the edge of two worlds. In the summer he might roam with his little camp far up into the mountains, where simple wandering shepherds drive their flocks higher and higher as the sun grows hotter. In the winter he might make expeditions across the wonderful plains, shining with the fresh green of young corn crops, where the roads and railways run among the great cities and innumerable villages, swarming with every variety of human life. In the intervals of his travel he might, if he had Mr Kipling's gift of expression, write, in the lively air of his chalet, seven thousand feet above the sea, books which would do something to bridge the vast gulf which lies between eastern and western minds. No one has expressed better than Mr Kipling the field in which

Briton and Indian do best meet-that of the elemental verities of brave deeds done in sport or war. His fine 'Ballad of East and West' contains the essence of this fellow-feeling, this touch of nature that makes us kin.

We have said that 'Kim' is not much of a story. Yet there is an allegory of all life in the joint travels of Kim and the lama, the one involved in the 'great game' of politics and intrigue, the other seeking to find in reality that which he had seen in vision. The world always goes on like that, most of it toiling in field or shop, some of it playing at various games like war or law or politics, and some of it indifferent to all these things, half despised and half revered by the rest, engaged in the endless pursuit of absolute truth. Nowhere are these contrasts more lively than in India, because there are no more ardent and serious players of games than the English (except the Scotch), and no more indefatigable and absorbed searchers after absolute truth than Hindus. Contrasts might be imagined in India as vivid as if an agent of the imperial police of Augustus, seeking to penetrate the manoeuvres of Herod, whose position was that of a powerful Raja, had travelled in the disguise of a servant in the train of the wise men of the East who were seeking for the new-born Saviour of the world.

Whether or not there is any likelihood of actual intrigues between Indian princes and powers beyond the northern frontier, as imagined in ' Kim,' the circumstance is sufficiently possible to make it fair game for the novelist. English romancers, following in the track of Stevenson with his Prince Otto,' have found in recent years a new field for romance in the minor Courts of the German Empire. Englishmen hardly grasp the fact that their own Indian Empire is full of princes, small and great, powerfully controlled from Calcutta and Simla, yet formally, and to a large extent actually, the rulers of their own dominions. In their relations to the Imperial Government they much resemble the client princes of the earlier Roman Empire. Subject to the control of the paramount power, exercised through strong diplomatic pressure, these princes have their own troops, their own courts of law, raise their own revenue. They cannot enter into diplomatic relations with each other, nor with outside powers; they cannot, of course, make peace or war; they cannot

by frontier taxes impede the general commerce; British Europeans in their territories are outside the jurisdiction of their courts; but they possess the rest of that divisible substance, sovereignty. Beneath their sway dwell some sixty-five millions out of the two hundred and eightyseven millions of the Indian Empire. Just as in the modern German Empire there are to be found considerable monarchies, like Prussia, Bavaria, and Saxony, with their own flags and governments, and also tiny states, like the republic of Bremen; so in India there are large states like the Nizam's dominions, the Gaekwar's territory, Mysore, and Kashmir, and below them states of all varying dimensions, down to the twenty or so minute hill-states, grouped under the control of the DeputyCommissioner of the Simla district, such as that, with its majestic army of seven men, which Mr Kipling wittily described in one of his stories. The size of some of the larger states is hardly grasped in England. Mysore, for instance, is as large in area as Ireland, with a larger population. Haiderabad, in area, exceeds England and Scotland together, and has a population of twelve millions -as large as that of England and Scotland a century ago. Kashmir is equal in size to six Switzerlands, though with a smaller population.

Thus, although in India the supreme will is that of the British Government, there is an ample sphere of local government by the princes and their councils. Empire has by no means swallowed up liberty, nor are the abilities of natives deprived of a career. According to the righteousness and capacity, or the reverse, of the reigning prince, so varies, or should vary, the interference of the British resident or controlling officer. Thus, in India the political service is a great foreign-office and diplomatic business. It is not, however, like that which centres in Downing Street, one which deals in business with independent nations. Its diplomacy is of the kind which an overwhelming paramount power uses towards dependent states, and partakes therefore, like the present control of Egypt, of the character of indirect administration. The whole subject forms a political study of the most interesting kind, and one, we may add, which is curiously neglected in English historical schools.

India offers a very useful example of the way in which