The publications which I have named above have not, as a rule, any structural cohesion. With the exception of _Badalia Herodsfoot_ and _The Light that Failed_, which deal with phases of London life, their contents might be thrown together without much loss of relation. The general mass so formed could then be redivided into several coherent sections. It may be remarked that Mr. Kipling's short stories, of which, as I have said, we hold nearly a hundred, mainly deal with three or four distinct classes of Indian life. We may roughly distinguish these as the British soldier in India, the Anglo-Indian, the Native, and the British child in India. In the following pages, I shall endeavour to characterise his treatment of these four classes. I retain the personal impression that it is pre-eminently as a poet that we shall eventually come to regard him. For the present his short stories fill the popular mind in connection with his name. II There can be no question that the side upon which Mr. Kipling's talent has most delicately tickled British curiosity, and British patriotism too, is his revelation of the soldier in India. A great body of our countrymen are constantly being drafted out to the East on Indian service. They serve their time, are recalled, and merge in the mass of our population; their strange temporary isolation between the civilian and the native, and their practical inability to find public expression for their feelings, make these men--to whom, though we so often forget it, we owe the maintenance of our Empire in the East--an absolutely silent section of the community. Of their officers we may know something, although _A Conference of the Powers_ may perhaps have awakened us to the fact that we know very little. Still, people like Tick Boileau and Captain Mafflin of the Duke of Derry's Pink Hussars are of ourselves; we meet them before they go out and when they come back; they marry our sisters and our daughters; and they lay down the law about India after dinner. Of the private soldier, on the other hand, of his loves and hates, sorrows and pleasures, of the way in which the vast, hot, wearisome country and its mysterious inhabitants strike him, of his attitude towards India, and of the way in which India treats him, we know, or knew until Mr. Kipling enlightened us, absolutely nothing. It is not surprising, then, if the novelty of this portion of his writings has struck ordinary English readers more than that of any other.