't care a pin for your conscience, fall to!

_Vous irez loin_! You will prattle in print about men's private lives
their hidden motives, their waistcoats, their wives, their boots, their
businesses, their incomes. 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.
Our literature from that continent of our conquest has been sparse
indeed, except in the way of biographies, of histories, and of rather
local and unintelligible _facetiae_. Except the novels by the author of
"Tara," and Sir Henry Cunningham's brilliant sketches, such as
"Dustypore," and Sir Alfred Lyall's poems, we might almost say that India
has contributed nothing to our finer literature. That old haunt of
history, the wealth of character brought out in that confusion of races,
of religions, and the old and new, has been wealth untouched, a treasure-
house sealed: those pagoda trees have never been shaken. At last there
comes an Englishman with eyes, with a pen extraordinarily deft, an
observation marvellously rapid and keen; and, by good luck, this
Englishman has no official duties: he is neither a soldier, nor a ju