re even less likely to be infallible--need not be pursued.

Our second story is the story of Aurelian McGoggin. Aurelian McGoggin
had read too many books, and he had too many theories. He also had a
creed: "It was not much of a creed. It only proved that men had no
souls, and there was no God and no hereafter, and that you must worry
along somehow for the good of humanity." McGoggin had found it an
excellent creed for a Government office, and he brought it to India and
tried to teach it to all his friends. His friends had found that life
in India is not long enough to waste in proving that there is no one
particular at the head of affairs, and they objected. They also warned
McGoggin not to be too good for his work, and not to insist on doing it
better than it needed to be done, because people in India wanted all
their energy for bare life. But McGoggin would not be warned, and one
day, when he had steadily overworked and overtalked through the hot
season, he was suddenly interrupted at the club, in the middle of an
oration. The doctor called it _aphasia_; but McGoggin only knew that
he was struck sensationally dumb: "Something had wiped his lips of
speech as a mother wipes the milky lips of her child, and he was
afraid. For a moment he had lost his mind and memory--which was
preposterous and something for which his philosophy did not allow.
Henceforth he did not appear to know so much as he used to about things
Divine."

McGoggin, in fact, was converted; for, as Mr Kipling explains, his
story is really a tract--a tract whose purpose is to convey that India
is able to cure the most resolute positivist of his positivism. Mr
Kipling's India is a land where science is mocked, and synthetic
philosophies perish, and mere talk is wiped from the lips. You do not
talk of Humanity in India, because in India "you really see
humanity--raw, brown, naked humanity--with nothing between it and the
blazing sky, and only the used-up, overhandled earth underfoot." Mr
Kipling's Indian administrators are practical and simple men, who obey
orders and accept the incredible because their position requires them
to administer India as though they were never at fault, whereas their
experience tells them that, if they are never to be at fault in India,
it is wise to be not too original and fatal to be too rigid.

_Tods' Amendment_ and _The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin_ are printed
among _Plain Tales from the Hills_. They look fo