But when, instead of romancing and creating, he is content to observe children, he is excellent in this as in other branches of careful natural history. But the children he observes, are, or we much misjudge him, himself. _Baa, Baa, Black Sheep_ is a strange compound of work at first and at second hand. Aunty Rosa (delightfully known, without a suspicion of supposed relationship, as "Antirosa"), the Mrs. Squeers of the Rocklington lodgings, is a sub-Dickensian creature, tricked out with a few touches of reality, but mainly a survival of early literary hatreds. The boy Harry and the soft little sister of Punch are rather shadowy. But Punch lives with an intense vitality, and here, without any indiscretion, we may be sure that Mr. Kipling has looked inside his own heart and drawn from memory. Nothing in the autobiographies of their childhood by Tolstoi and Pierre Loti, nothing in Mr. R. L. Stevenson's _Child's Garden of Verses_, is more valuable as a record of the development of childhood than the account of how Punch learned to read, moved by curiosity to know what the "falchion" was with which the German man split the Griffin open. Very nice, also, is the reference to the mysterious rune, called "Sonny, my Soul," with which mamma used to sing Punch to sleep. By far the most powerful and ingenious story, however, which Mr. Kipling has yet dedicated to a study of childhood is _The Drums of the Fore and Aft_. "The Fore and Aft" is a nickname given in derision to a crack regiment, whose real title is "The Fore and Fit," in memory of a sudden calamity which befell them on a certain day in an Afghan pass, when, if it had not been for two little blackguard drummer-boys, they would have been wofully and contemptibly cut to pieces, as they were routed by a dashing troop of Ghazis. The two little heroes, who only conquer to die, are called Jakin and Lew, stunted children of fourteen, "gutter-birds" who drink and smoke and "do everything but lie," and are the disgrace of the regiment. In their little souls, however, there burns what Mr. Pater would call a "hard, gem-like flame" of patriotism, and they are willing to undergo any privation, if only they may wipe away the stigma of being "bloomin' non-combatants."