Most of your prattle will
inevitably be lies. But go on! nobody will kick you, I deeply
regret to say. You will earn money. You will be welcomed in
society. You will live and die content, and without remorse. I do
not suppose that any particular inferno will await you in the future
life. Whoever watches this world "with larger other eyes than ours"
will doubtless make allowance for you, as for us all. I am not
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.
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