Not less than this Mr. Kipling has done in a little group of stories which I cannot but hold to be the culminating point of his genius so far. If the remainder of his writings were swept away, posterity would be able to reconstruct its Rudyard Kipling from _Without Benefit of Clergy_, _The Man who Would be King_, _The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes_, and _Beyond the Pale_. More than that, if all other record of Indian habits had been destroyed, much might be conjectured from these of the pathos, the splendour, the cruelty, and the mystery of India. From _The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows_ more is to be gleaned of the real action of opium-smoking, and the causes of that indulgence, than from many sapient debates in the British House of Commons. We come very close to the confines of the moonlight-coloured world of magic in _The Bisara of Pooree_. For pure horror and for the hopeless impenetrability of the native conscience there is _The Recrudescence of Imray_. In a revel of colour and shadow, at the close of the audacious and Lucianic story of _The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney_, we peep for a moment into the mystery of "a big queen's praying at Benares." Admirable, too, are the stories which deal with the results of attempts made to melt the Asiatic and the European into one. The red-headed Irish-Thibetan who makes the king's life a burden to him in the fantastic story of _Namgay Doola_ represents one extremity of this chain of grotesque Eurasians; Michele D'Cruze, the wretched little black police inspector, with a drop of white blood in his body, who wakes up to energetic action at one supreme moment of his life, is at the other. The relapse of the converted Indian is a favourite theme with this cynical observer of human nature. It is depicted in _The Judgment of Dungara_, with a rattling humour worthy of Lever, where the whole mission, clad in white garments woven of the scorpion nettle, go mad with fire and plunge into the river, while the trumpet of the god bellows triumphantly from the hills. In _Lispeth_ we have a study--much less skilfully worked out, however--of the Indian woman carefully Christianised from childhood reverting at once to heathenism when her passions reach maturity.