tt saw them. In London, in the early days of Dickens, there were
hordes of capable writers eager for something new. Not one of them saw
Bob Cratchit, or Fagin, or the Marchioness until Dickens saw them. So,
in India, the British Tommy had lived for many a year, and the jungle
beasts were there, and Government House and its society were there,
and capable men went up and down the land, sensible of its charm, its
wonder, its remoteness from themselves, and yet not discerning truly.
At last, when a thousand feet have trodden upon a thing of inestimable
price, there comes along a newspaper man, doing the driest kind of
hackwork, bound to a drudgery as stale and dreary as any in life, and he
sees what no man has ever seen before him, though it has been plain in
view for years and years. Through scorn and discouragement and contumely
he polishes his treasure, in painful hours snatched from distasteful
labour, and at last he brings it where it can be seen and known for what
it is.*

* I learn, on the very best authority, that Mr. Kipling
regards his early and unrecognised days in India with much
kindlier eyes than this would seem to indicate. It may be
thought that, knowing this, I should amend or delete the
passage. I let it stand, however, with this note as a
qualification, because I think it possible that he, like the
rest of us, looks on the past through tinted spectacles.

It is only genius which owns the seeing eye. There are in Great Britain
to-day a dozen writers of fine faculty, trained to observe, trained
to give to observation its fullest artistic result; and they are all
panting for something new. The something new is under their noses. They
see it and touch it every day. If I could find it, my name in a year
would sail over the seas, and I should be a great personage. But I
shall not find it. None of the men who are now known will find it. It is
always the unknown man who makes that sort of discovery. He will come in
time, and when he comes we shall wonder and admire, and say: 'How new!
How true!' Why, in that very matter of Tommy Atkins, whose manifold
portraits have done as much as anything to endear Kipling to the English
people--it is known to many that in my own foolish youth I enlisted in
the Army. I lived with Tommy. I fought and chaffed and drank and drilled
and marched, and went 'up tahn' with him, and did pack drill, and had
C.B. with him. I turned novel-writer afterwa