In 1897 he tried his hand for the second time at a complete novel, _Captains Courageous_, and the result might safely be called a success. The moral of this story will be worth a word or two later on. The next year an important volume came from his pen, _The Day's Work_--important because it is in this volume that the new Kipling is first plainly seen, and the mechanical engineer takes the place of the literary artist. Such curiosities as _The Ship that Found Herself_, _The Bridge-Builders_, _.007_, became anything but curiosities in his later work. This collection was sadly marred by the inclusion of such wretched stuff as _My Sunday at Home_, and _An Error in the Fourth Dimension_; but it was glorified by one of the most exquisitely tender and beautiful of all Mr. Kipling's tales, _William the Conqueror_. And it should not be forgotten that the author saw fit to close this volume with the previously printed and universally popular _Brushwood Boy_. Then, at the very height of his ten years' fame, Mr. Kipling came closer to death than almost any other individual has safely done. As he lay sick with pneumonia in New York, the American people, whom he has so frequently ridiculed, were more generally and profoundly affected than they have been at the bedside of a dying President. The year 1899 marked the great physical crisis of his life, and seems also to indicate a turning-point in his literary career. Whatever may be thought of the relative merits of Mr. Kipling's early and later style, it is fortunate for him that the two decades of composition were not transposed. We all read the early work because we could not help it; we read his twentieth-century compositions because he wrote them. It is lucky that the _Plain Tales from the Hills_ preceded _Puck of Pook's Hill_, and that _The Light that Failed_ came before _Stalky and Co._ Whether these later productions could have got into print without the tremendous prestige of their author's name, is a question that has all the fascination and all the insolubility of speculative philosophy. The suddenness of his early popularity may be perhaps partly accounted for by the fact that he was working a new field. The two authors who have most influenced Mr. Kipling's style are both Americans--Bret Harte and Mark Twain; and the analogy between the sudden fame of Harte and the sudden fame of Mr. Kipling is too obvious to escape notice. Bret Harte found in California ore of a different kind than his maddened contemporaries sought; his early tales had all the charm of something new and strange. What Bret Harte made out of California Mr. Kipling made out of India; at the beginning he was a "sectional writer," who, with the instinct of genius, made his literary opportunity out of his environment. The material was at hand, the time was ripe, and the man was on the spot. It was the strong "local colour" in these powerful Indian tales that captivated readers--who, in far-away