us the talk of the polo pony and of the blooded trotter; and thus he was led to compose ‘007,’ in which we see the pattern of the primitive beast-fable so stretched as to enable us to overhear the intimate conversation of humanized locomotives, the steeds of steel that puff and pant in and out of the roundhouse in an American railroad yard.  Yet one more extension of the pattern enabled him to take a final step; after having given a human soul to separate engines, he proceeded then to animate the several parts of a single machine.  And thus we have ’How the Ship Found Herself’ and the later ‘Below the Mill-dam.’  But altho these are successive stages of the primitive beast-fable as it has been modified in Mr. Kipling’s restless hands, there is little flagrant originality, even at the end, since ‘How the Ship Found Herself’ is seen to be only an up-to-date version of one of the earliest fables, the ‘Belly and the Members.’

Interesting as it may be to clamber up into the spreading family-tree of fiction, it is not here that we must seek for the stem from which the Mowgli stories ultimately flowered.  These stories are not directly derived from the beast-fable, altho his mastery of that literary pattern may have helped the author to find his final form.  They are a development from one of his own tales, ‘In the Rukh,’ included at first in ‘Many Inventions,’ and now transferred to its proper place at the end of the book in which the adventures of Mowgli are recorded.  In that first tale, which is now the last, we have set before us the impression Mowgli and his little brothers, the wolves, made upon two white men in the Indian service; and incidentally we are permitted to snatch a glimpse or two of Mowgli’s youth in the jungle.  But the story is told from the point of view of these white men; and it is small wonder that when the author came to look again at what he had written he saw how rich it was in its possibilities.  He was moved to go back to narrate the whole series of Mowgli’s adventures from the very beginning, with Mowgli himself as the center of the narrative and with little obtrusion of the white man’s civilization.

There was invention in this early story, and imagination also, altho not so abundant.  But as the author brooded over the incidents of Mowgli’s babyhood there in the thick of the forest, in the midst of the beasts, whose blood-brother he became, suddenly his imagination revealed to him that the jungle and all its inhabitants must be governed by law, or else it was a realm of chaos.  It is this portrayal of wild life subject to an immitigable code which gives its sustaining moral to the narrative of Mowgli’s career.  As Mr. Kipling said to me once, “When I had found the Law of the Jungle the rest was easy!” For him it may have been easy, since his invention is ever fresh and fertile; but the finding of the Law of the Jungle—­that transcended mere invention with all its multiplied ingenuities—­that was a stroke of imagination.