off her strange fetters.  The Bridge before the night of the flood has passed away becomes the symbol of a wrestle between the most ancient gods and the young will of man.  Mr Kipling has put the Bridge into the foreground of his picture, has made of it the really sentient figure of the tale.  Here definitely he writes the first chapter of his book of steam and steel; and we begin to be aware of an enthusiasm which is lacking in many of the highly finished proofs which preceded it that Mr Kipling could write almost anything as well as almost anybody else.  In The Day’s Work he passes into a province which he was insistently urged to occupy by right of inspiration.

The Day’s Work brings us directly into touch with one of the most distinctive features of Mr Kipling’s method.  He has never been able to resist the lure of things technical.  If he writes of a horse he must write as though he had bred and sold horses all his life.  If he writes of a steam-engine he must write as though he had spent his life among pistons and cylinders.  He writes of ships and the sea, of fox-hunting, of the punishing of Pathans, of drilling by companies and of agriculture; and he writes as one from whom no craft could hide its mysteries.  This fascination of mere craft, this delight in the technicalities and dialect of the world’s work, is not a mannerism.  It is not a parade of omniscience or the madness of a note-book worm.  It is fundamental in Mr Kipling.  It is wrong to think of Between the Devil and the Deep Sea or of _.007_ as the unfortunate rioting of an amateur machinist.  To those who object that Mr Kipling has spoiled these stories with an absurd enthusiasm for bolts and bars it has at once to be answered that but for this very enthusiasm for bolts and bars, which the undiscerning have found so tedious, the great majority of Mr Kipling’s stories would never have been written at all.  A powerful turbine excites in Mr Kipling precisely the same quality of emotion which a comely landscape excited in Wordsworth; and this emotion is stamped upon all that he has written in this kind.  There is a passage in Between the Devil and the Deep Sea which runs: 

“What follows is worth consideration.  The forward engine had no more work to do.  Its released piston-rod, therefore, drove up fiercely, with nothing to check it, and started most of the nuts of the cylinder-cover.  It came down again, the full weight of the steam behind it, and the foot of the disconnected connecting-rod, useless as the leg of a man with a sprained ankle, flung out to the right and struck the starboard, or right-hand, cast-iron supporting-column of the forward engine, cracking it clean through about six inches above the base, and wedging the upper portion outwards three inches towards the ship’s side.  There the connecting-rod jammed.  Meantime, the after engine, being as yet unembarrassed, went on with its work, and in so doing brought round at its next revolution the crank of the forward engine, which smote the already jammed connecting-rod, bending it and therewith the piston-rod cross-head—­the big cross-piece that slides up and down so smoothly.”