It is in these Indian stories that Mr. Kipling displays more than anywhere else the accuracy of his eye and the retentiveness of his memory. No detail escapes him, and, without seeming to emphasise the fact, he is always giving an exact feature where those who are in possession of fewer facts or who see less vividly are satisfied with a shrewd generality. V In Mr. Kipling's first volume there was one story which struck quite a different note from all the others, and gave promise of a new delineator of children. _Tods' Amendment_, which is a curiously constructed piece of work, is in itself a political allegory. It is to be noticed that when he warms to his theme the author puts aside the trifling fact that Tods is an infant of six summers, and makes him give a clear statement of collated native opinion worthy of a barrister in ample practice. What led to the story, one sees without difficulty, was the wish to emphasise the fact that unless the Indian Government humbles itself, and becomes like Tods, it can never legislate with efficiency, because it never can tell what all the _jhampanis_ and _saises_ in the bazar really wish for. If this were all, Mr. Kipling in creating Tods would have shown no more real acquaintance with children than other political allegorists have shown with sylphs or Chinese philosophers. But Mr. Kipling is always an artist, and in order to make a setting for his child-professor of jurisprudence, he invented a really convincing and delightful world of conquering infancy. Tods, who lives up at Simla with Tods' mamma, and knows everybody, is "an utterly fearless young pagan," who pursues his favourite kid even into the sacred presence of the Supreme Legislative Council, and is on terms of equally well-bred familiarity with the Viceroy and with Futteh Khan, the villainous loafer _khit_ from Mussoorie. To prove that _Tods' Amendment_ was not an accident, and also, perhaps, to show that he could write about children purely and simply, without any after-thought of allegory, he brought out, as the sixth instalment of the _Indian Railway Library_, a little volume entirely devoted to child-life. Of the four stories contained in this book one is among the finest productions of its author, while two others are very good indeed. There are also, of course, the children in _The Light that Failed_, although they are too closely copied from the author's previous creations in _Baa, Baa, Black Sheep_; and in other writings of his, children take a position sufficiently prominent to justify us in considering this as one of the main divisions of his work.