tho it is—­it does not deserve to be known so widely.  This is because it is not so good as the other books of the same writer, not so good in its kind as they are in theirs.  The tales that dealt with Sherlock Holmes and Brigadier Gerard and the White Company are works of invention mainly; and the writer had proved himself capable of adroit and ingenious invention.  ‘A Duet,’ dealing with the commonplaces of life, needed not invention, which would indeed almost be out of place in a humdrum chronicle; it demanded imagination to interpret the commonplace and to transfigure the humdrum, revealing their essential significance.  And this imagination the author had not at his call, in spite of his command over the more showy invention.

It may not be without interest to consider how another writer of our time, not seeking for originality, happened to find it, and how his acceptance of certain literary patterns, so to call them—­patterns inherited from the remote and shadowy past of our race—­led him to an unforeseen effort of illuminative imagination, which suddenly elevated what he had done and gave it a significance far wider and far deeper than the author had foreseen.  In the two successive volumes of the ‘Jungle Book’ (as it was originally published) there are two sets of stories commingled and yet sharply distinct.  One group deals with the boyhood of Mowgli among the beasts of the forest; and to many of us these linked tales represent the highest achievement of Mr. Kipling’s genius; they seem as assured of survival as anything which the nineteenth century has transmitted to the twentieth.  The other stories, the ‘White Seal’ and the ‘Undertakers’ and their companions, stand on a lower level; they are good stories, no doubt,—­very good, indeed, one or two of them.  But they have an added importance in that they seem to have been the needful accompaniment of the Mowgli tales; they may be considered as the underbrush that at first protected the growth of the loftier tree.

They are modern examples of the beast-fable, latter-day amplifications of the simple tale of animals credited with human cunning, such as primitive man told to his naked children as they huddled around the embers in the cave, which was then their only home.  The beast-fable is a literary pattern of an undiscoverable antiquity, as alluring to-day as ever before, since the child in us fortunately never dies.  It is a pattern which Mr. Kipling has handled with a constant affection and with a large freedom.  His earlier animal tales dealt with wild beasts, or at least with the creatures of the forests and of the ocean beyond the influence of man and remote from his haunts.  Soon he availed himself of the same pattern to tell stories of animals domesticated and in close contact with man; and thus he gave us the ‘Walking Delegate’ and the ‘Maltese Cat.’  In time betook a further step and applied to the iron horse of the railroad the method which had enabled him to set before