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all races and castes were known to him familiarly; he interviewed priests and fakirs; he was a boon companion of Tommy Atkins; he explored Chinese opium-dens; he absorbed the technical jargon of popular sports; he mastered the details of the English administration; he haunted the society of Mrs. Hauksbee and her set in order to photograph on his memory every gesture and every word. At no time in his life more than when in India did he justify Mr. James Whitcomb Riley's apt characterization: “ He is a regular literary blotting-pad, soaking up everything on the face of the earth.”

5. EARLY WRITINGS. — Young Kipling found leisure outside of office hours to dash off short stories and satirical ballads which appeared from time to time in Indian newspapers and won immediate popularity. As early as 1886 his name was well known throughout India. In this year the best

of the satirical verses were put together at Lahore in

¢

a sort of a book, a lean, oblong docket, to imitate a Government envelope, bound in brown paper, and tied with red tape." It was not long before it became a cloth-bound volume with gilt top, for several editions followed, but the author confesses to have loved it best when it was a little brown baby with a pink string around his stomach." So rare is the first edition now that a copy in good condition will fetch nearly or quite one hundred and fifty dollars.

The year 1888 was one of extraordinary productiveness. Not fewer than seven books of prose fiction were published by Mr. Kipling. Of these the most noted if not the most notable is Plain Tales

from the Hills. Before its publication the author had been popular and widely known; with its publication came fame.

6. AMERICAN TRIP. But Mr. Kipling's fame was still confined almost wholly to Anglo-India. In 1889, sent by the Pioneer, to which he contributed entertaining letters of travel, he left India for England, armed with the slender volumes which had been printed in Lahore and Allahabad, and with manuscripts in which he had unbounded faith. He returned by way of Japan, San Francisco, and New York, thinking first to launch his literary ventures in the United States. In this he was disappointed. But if American publishers looked askance, his trip furnished pleasurable experiences and a liberal supply of "copy." Note-book in hand, he visited the Golden Gate and the Yellowstone; he explored Chicago, Salt Lake City, Buffalo, and New York. He fished for salmon in the Clackamas; he watched the evolutions of the United States army, and studied rural America at Musquash on the Monongahela. The Pioneer gives us the results of his impressions : the most bitterly satiric picture of American society which the world had seen since the publication of Dickens' American Notes in 1842.

7. LIFE IN LONDON. The autumn of 1889 saw Mr. Kipling established in London fighting for recognition from the public. Although his stories. found a publisher, they obtained almost no popular sale, until a favorable review in the Times (1890) brought him suddenly into notice. The most

obscure author in London awoke to find himself the most talked of. The World pronounced him "the literary hero of the present hour." A friend who visited him at his chambers in the Strand discovered "a vast number of invitations from the best representative people of England lying on the table unanswered." It was literary not social success which he coveted. "I want to give good work," he said to a reporter of the World, "that is my only concern in life."

8. MARRIAGE. In 1891 Mr. Kipling made a long voyage to South Africa, Australia, Ceylon, and New Zealand. In the same year he met in London Mr. Wolcott Balestier, the brilliant young American author with whom he afterward collaborated The Naulahka. He became acquainted also with Balestier's sister Caroline, between whom and himself there sprang up a strong friendship that ripened into love. They were married in London, Jan. 18, 1892.

Caroline Starr Balestier is the eldest daughter of the late H. Wolcott Balestier, of New York City, and comes of distinguished ancestry on both sides. Her

maternal grandfather, the late Judge Peshine Smith, was said by William H. Seward to have a profounder knowledge of international law than any other living man. It was Judge Smith who, on the recommendation of Seward, drafted for the Mikado of Japan commercial treaties between that nation and the

great powers of the world. His large fortune was left to his daughter, Mrs. Balestier, who holds it in trust for her six children.

The old family estate of the Balestiers (Beechwood) was in Brattleboro, Vt., and here, in the home of her grandparents, much of Mrs. Rudyard Kipling's girlhood was passed. "A visit with her husband to these scenes of her childhood resulted in the selection of the site for their home among the broad Balestier acres."

9. RESIDENCE IN THE UNITed States. From August, 1892, to September, 1896, Mr. Kipling made his home in Brattleboro. The young couple's first attempt at housekeeping was in the Bliss cottage, near the mansion of the Balestiers. Here they lived while their new house was building. The cottage is "a neat little white-clapboard, story-and-a-half fabric, which the novelist at first thought 'just large enough for two,' but which soon had a third occupant in the person of an infant daughter." It was in this hillside cottage that some of the poems of the Seven Seas were written, that Many Inventions was completed, and the Jungle Book stories were begun.

But popular interest centres chiefly about the Naulahka, Mr. Kipling's later house, and the only one he ever built for himself. It is "a long, low, two-storied frame bungalow of but a single room in depth, whose dun hues blend and harmonize with those of the hillside." A Brattleboro visitor writes, "I went through the partly constructed Naulahka and heard the owner describe its theory. He called it a ship, with the propeller, that is, the material provision of the furnace and kitchen, at the stern, and his own study, opening upon the roomy piazza looking to the south and east, at the bow." 2

It was in his capacious study at the Naulahka that many of Mr. Kipling's finest poems and short stories were written, as well as the whole of the Gloucester fishing-tale · "Captains Courageous.”

IO. ENGLAND AND SOUTH AFRICA. On leaving Vermont, Mr. Kipling returned to England and took a house for a short time at Torquay. Early in 1898 the poet with his family made a tour to Cape Town, South Africa, where his greeting from the English population was exceedingly warm. He removed in the spring of this year to his present home, Rottingdean, Sussex, a village near Brighton. place is called "The Elms," from the superb trees surrounding it. Here Mr. Kipling has led a quiet, retired life, keeping in good form for his literary

1 Wolfe's Literary Haunts and Homes.
2 The Rev. C. O. Day, in Congregationalist.

His

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