labor by a three-hours' morning ride and a walk of five or six miles later in the day. His evenings are frequently passed at the village inn, where he smokes with the landlord and discusses politics.

The autumn of 1898 brought Mr. Kipling an opportunity for observing the Royal Navy at close range. On the invitation of one of the commanding officers he enjoyed a cruise with the Channel Squadron around the coast of Ireland; this resulted in the series of brilliant descriptive letters contributed to the London Morning Post under the title "A Fleet in Being."

II. VISIT TO AMERICA AND ILLNESS. In the latter part of January, 1899, Mr. Kipling sailed for America with his family, intending to make a short stay in New York and Washington, after which he purposed to visit Mexico. He arrived February 2, and had hardly become settled in New York before he began to suffer from a serious cold which refused to be shaken off. On the 20th he was taken suddenly ill with an inflammation of the lungs that developed rapidly into "double" pneumonia. Everything was done for the poet which medical science and the loving care of his wife could devise, but he grew worse, and for a number of days was kept alive only by the administration of oxygen. He was, most of the time, unconscious. Dr. Janeway, the well-known New York specialist, and Dr. Dùnham who married Miss Josephine Balestier,

Mrs. Kipling's younger sister, had charge of the case, and were unwearying in their attentions. The sick man's apartments were at the Grenoble, and the hotel corridors were crowded with anxious friends, while a stream of telegrams and cable-dispatches poured in upon Mrs. Kipling. New York and Boston dailies devoted their leading columns to discussing the case, and the London papers issued extras for every bulletin. Max Eliot, the London correspondent, wrote: "In the streets the only cry of the newsboys is, Latest reports of Rudyard Kipling.'" The German Kaiser sent the following dispatch to the author's wife:

BERLIN, March 5.

MRS. RUDYARD KIPLING, Hotel Grenoble :

As an enthusiastic admirer of the unrivalled books of your husband, I am most anxious for news about his health. God grant that he may be spared to you and to all who are thankful to him for the soul-stirring way in which he has sung about the deeds of our great common race.

WILLIAM, I. R.

The crisis in the disease was passed in the morning of March first; a slight gain in a resolution of the lower lobes could be reported, and the patient dropped into his first refreshing sleep for days.

12. DEATH OF MR. KIPLING'S DAUGHTER. Meantime Elsie and Josephine, Mr. Kipling's little daughters, had fallen ill with pneumonia. Elsie, the younger, had recovered, but on March 6 Josephine, a six-year-old, and the eldest of Mr.

Kipling's three children, died at the home of a family friend whither she had been removed early in her illness. The child's death was carefully concealed from her father for several days, and all matters connected with the funeral were, in accordance with Mrs. Kipling's earnest wish, kept entirely private. The doctors finally decided to break the news, since the worry which the patient exhibited about the little one's whereabouts and welfare was deemed to be more dangerous than the truth. "Tears stood in the poet's eyes," says a contemporary account, "and he murmured, half to himself, half aloud: Poor little Joe.""

13. RESTORATION TO HEALTH.-Despite the sorrow of this great bereavement, Mr. Kipling suffered no relapse, though his improvement was very slow. By the second of April he was out of bed and well on the road to recovery. It was on that day that he gave to the press the following letter of thanks:

HOTEL GRENOBLE, EASTER DAY, 1899.

DEAR SIR: Will you allow me through your columns to attempt some acknowledgment of the wonderful sympathy, affection, and kindness shown towards me during my recent illness, as well as the unfailing courtesy that controlled its expression? I am not strong enough to answer letters in detail, so I must take this means of thanking, as humbly as sincerely, the countless people of good will throughout the world who have put me under a debt I can never hope to repay.

Faithfully yours,

RUDYARD KIPLING.

In the latter part of June Mr. Kipling and his family returned to their English home.

14. PERSONALITY. In appearance Mr. Kipling is a little under average

pact figure and a slight stoop.

and alert eyes.

stature, with a comBehind the spectacles,

worn to correct astigmatism, gleam a pair of kind In more than one respect Rudyard Kipling the child was the father of Rudyard Kipling The following description of the poet as he looked in the early summer of 1879 was contributed to the San Francisco Examiner by Mr. George Arnold Wilkie, an old classmate:

the man.

"Picture to yourself a chunky, open-faced boy of about fourteen years. He was very brown from his residence in India, and he had thick black hair, rather inclined to be curly. His jaw was strong, his teeth large and very white. He had a rolling gait, and walked with his fists crammed in the pockets of his coat. He was a fairly good tennis player, and I know he used to grieve at his nearsightedness, which prevented him from excelling in the sport. As a boy Kipling was notably careless in dress. He would not comb and brush his thick hair carefully, and he had a habit of going with his shoe laces untied. He loved to fish all by himself, or, at any rate, with only one companion, and he would come home to his immaculate mother and sister with a mass of dock burrs or several varieties of nettles clinging to his clothes in a dozen places,

while fish scales stuck to his coat and trousers like

Mr. Robinson's first impression of the poet is worth reprinting. "With Kipling himself I was disappointed at first. At the time of which I am writing, early in 1886, his face had not acquired the character of manhood, and contrasted somewhat unpleasantly with his stoop (acquired through much bending over an office table), his heavy eyebrows, his spectacles, and his sallow Anglo-Indian complexion, while his jerky speech and abrupt movements added to the unfavorable impression. But his conversation was brilliant, and his sterling character gleamed through the humorous light which shone behind his spectacles, and in ten minutes he fell into his natural place as the most striking member of a remarkably clever and charming family." A reporter for the London World described Mr. Kipling in 1890 as “a short, but broadly-figured man, dark, with blue eyes and a resolute jaw, still quite young, he is not yet twenty-five, but with a face on which time and incident have prematurely traced many tell-tale marks." A more recent scribe has this: "I happened to dine at the same table with him at the hotel, and though I recognized him from portraits which I had seen, I might have done so from the

1 Condensed from an abstract of the article in Current Literature for April, 1899.