gant improbability. The American's restless energy, brought
face to face with Oriental immobility, expresses itself in the
following way:

'It made him tired to see the fixedness, the apathy, and
lifelessness of this rich and populous world, which should be up
and stirring by rights--trading, organising, inventing, building
new towns, making the old ones keep up with the procession, laying
new railroads, going in for fresh enterprises, and keeping things
humming.

'"They've got resources enough," he said. "It isn't as if they had
the excuse that the country's poor. It's a good country. Move the
population of a lively Colorado town to Rhatore, set up a good
local paper, organise a board of trade, and let the world know what
is here, and we'd have a boom in six months that would shake the
empire. But what's the use? They're dead. They're mummies. They're
wooden images. There isn't enough real, old-fashioned, downright
rustle and razzle-dazzle and 'git up and git' in Gokral Seetaram to
run a milk-cart."'

Such indeed might be the sentiments of an eager speculator who found
himself among primitive folk. But the discord of ideas puts the whole
piece so completely out of tune as to produce only a harsh and jarring
sensation; the rough Western man is thoroughly out of his element, and
flounders heavily, like a cockney among mediaeval crusaders. This must
be taken in fairness to be the result of collaboration, for in his own
short stories Mr. Kipling never commits solecisms of the kind; on the
contrary, he excels in the shading of strong local colours, and in
the rapid, unerring delineation of characters that stand out in clear
relief, yet blend with and act upon each other when they encounter.
But Mr. Kipling's volumes would require a separate article to
themselves, so that we will merely take this occasion of recording our
wish that he may some day turn his unique faculty of painting real
Indian pictures toward the composition of a novel which shall _not_ be
about Anglo-Indian society (for the thin soil of that field has
already been over-harrowed), but shall give a true and lively
rendering of the thoughts which strike an imaginative Englishman when
he surveys the whole moving landscape of our Indian empire, watches
the course of actual events, and tries to forecast its probable
destiny.

It has been manifestly impossible in this brief article to