eanwhile
removed from Bombay to Lahore, where his father was at the head of the
most important school of the arts in India. The _Civil and Military
Gazette_ is the chief journal of northwestern India, owned and
conducted by the managers and owners of the Allahabad _Pioneer_, the
ablest and most influential of all Indian newspapers published in the
interior of the country.

For five years he worked hard and steadily on the _Gazette_. Much of
the work was simple drudgery. He shirked nothing. The editor-in-chief
was a somewhat grim man, who believed in snubbing his subordinates,
and who, though he recognized the talents of the "clever pup," as he
called him, and allowed him a pretty free hand in his contributions to
the paper, yet was inclined to exact from him the full tale of the
heavy routine work of a newspaper office.

But these were happy years. For the youth was feeling the spring of
his own powers, was full of interest in life, was laying up stores of
observation and experience, and found in his own home not only
domestic happiness, but a sympathy in taste and a variety of talent
and accomplishment which acted as a continual stimulus to his own
genius. Father, mother, sister, and brother all played and worked
together with rare combination of sympathetic gifts. In 1885 some of
the verses with the writing of which he and his sister had amused
themselves were published at Lahore, in a little volume entitled
"Echoes," because most of them were lively parodies on some of the
poems of the popular poets of the day. The little book had its moment
of narrowly limited success and opened the way for the wider notoriety
and success of a volume into which were gathered the "Departmental
Ditties" that had appeared from time to time in the _Gazette_. Many of
the stories also which were afterward collected under the now familiar
title of "Plain Tales from the Hills" made their first appearance in
the _Gazette_, and attracted wide attention in the Anglo-Indian
community.

Kipling's work for five years at Lahore had indeed been of such
quality that it was not surprising that he was called down to
Allahabad, in 1887, to take a place upon the editorial staff of the
_Pioneer_. The training of an Anglo-Indian journalist is peculiar. He
has to master knowledge of many kinds, to become thoroughly acquainted
with the affairs of the English administration and the conditions of
Anglo-Indian life, and at the same time with the interests,