s Mr Kipling's escape
from the India which is traversed by the railway and served by the
"Pioneer." It is the escape of Dan and Una into the Kingdom of Puck,
and the escape of Mowgli into the Jungle. It is the escape, finally,
of Mr Kipling's genius into the region where it most freely breathes.

We have noted that Kim is one of the Indian doors by which we enter;
but there is a more open door in the first story of _The Second Jungle
Book_. It is the best of all Mr Kipling's stories, just as the _Jungle
Books_ are the best of all his books. It concerns the Indian, Purun
Bhagat.

He was learned, supple, and deeply intimate in the affairs of the
world. He had shared the counsels of princes; he had been received
with honour in the clubs and societies of Europe. He was, to all
appearances, a polite blend of all the talents of East and West. Then
suddenly Purun Bhagat disappeared. All India understood; but of all
Western people only Mr Kipling was able to follow where he walked as a
holy man and a beggar into the hills. There he became St Francis of
the Hills, living in a little shrine with the friendly creatures of the
woods, venerated and cared for by a village on the hillside.

All Mr Kipling's readers know how that story ends--how on a night of
disaster there came together as of one blood the saint and his people
and the wild creatures who had housed with him. It is quoted here as
showing how the old piety of India beckoned Mr Kipling into the jungle
as inevitably as the old loyalty of England beckoned him into a region
where on a summer day we can meet without surprise a Flint Man or a
Centurion of Rome.

Always the bent of Mr Kipling, in his best work, is found to be away
from the world. To appreciate his finer quality we must pass with him
into the Rukh, or into the country beyond Policeman Day, into the
mansion of lost children, or into a region where it is but a step from
the Zodiac to fields under the plough. The tales of Mr Kipling which
will longest survive him are not the tales where he is competently
brutal and omniscient, but the tales where he instinctively flies from
the necessity of giving to his vision the likeness of the modern world.

We may now realise more clearly the peril which lies in the popular
fallacy concerning Mr Kipling described in the first few pages of this
book. So far is Mr Kipling from being an author inspired and driven to
claim a share in the active life of the presen