that by the nature of
his publication and presentment that he is doing something he thinks
worthy of the time and place in which he lives and of the people to
whom he belongs, then if he does not construct he is negligible.

Yet, I say, the great mass of men to-day do not attempt it in the
English tongue, and the proof is that you can discover in their
slipshod pages nothing of a seal or stamp. You do not, opening a book
at random, say at once: "This is the voice of such and such a one." It
is no one's manner or voice. It is part of a common babel.

Therefore in such a time as that of our decline, to come across work
which is planned, executed and achieved has something of the effect
produced by the finding of a wrought human thing in the wild. It is
like finding, as I once found, deep hidden in the tangled rank grass
of autumn in Burgundy, on the edge of a wood not far from Dijon, a
neglected statue of the eighteenth century. It is like coming round
the corner of some wholly desolate upper valley in the mountains and
seeing before one a well-cultivated close and a strong house in the
midst.

It is now many years--I forget how many; it may be twenty or more, or
it may be a little less--since _The Wallet of Kai Lung_ was sent me by
a friend. The effect produced upon my mind at the first opening of its
pages was in the same category as the effect produced by the discovery
of that hidden statue in Burgundy, or the coming upon an unexpected
house in the turn of a high Pyrenean gorge. Here was something worth
doing and done. It was not a plan attempted and only part achieved
(though even that would be rare enough to-day, and a memorable
exception); it was a thing intended, wrought out, completed and
established. Therefore it was destined to endure and, what is more
important, it was a success.

The time in which we live affords very few of such moments of relief:
here and there a good piece of verse, in _The New Age_ or in the now
defunct _Westminster_: here and there a lapidary phrase such as a
score or more of Blatchford's which remain fixed in my memory. Here
and there a letter written to the newspapers in a moment of
indignation when the writer, not trained to the craft, strikes out the
metal justly at white heat. But, I say, the thing is extremely rare,
and in the shape of a complete book rarest of all.

_The Wallet of Kai Lung_ was a thing made deliberately, in hard
material and completely successful. It was mean