It contains the whole of India,-incalculably rich, unspeakably poor: with its teeming cities, barbaric, uralt its forgotten temples crumbling to decay in the dusk of "caverns measureless to man " its ravenous holy rivers and heart-breaking stretches of burning plain, and the overpowering grandeur of that mountain barrier upon the north, which dwarfs all the other highlands of the globe into practicable hills. We have to part from Kim in the flush of his first victory, when the down is barely sprouted upon his shapely lip, and the women, one and all, who soften to his beauty, are summarily dismissed from his consciousness as those who "eternally pester" him! We long to know more, but feel that it would be greedy to ask it for, bald as this outline of a plot may seem, the little book, like the country where the scene of it passes, is infinite.
The result is that he distinguishes himself, while yet a stripling, by capturing in the high Himilayas the credentials and dispatches of a formidable Russian spy, and-this is all. Before he is done with school the remarkable fitness for employment in the secret Indian service of the English government is discovered by our old friend Colonel Creighton, and he is placed under the tuition of sundry wonderful native proficients to learn the first principles of the Great Game. Xavier's, however, only upon condition of being allowed still to tramp the continent in the long vacation with his beloved old Buddhist priest. Kim is presently recognized upon his travels, reclaimed and adopted by the Irish regiment of which his father had been color sergeant, and given a genteel sufficiency of education in a Catholic college. The pious people of the country are permitted to "acquire merit" by feeding and lodging these two, between whom there grows up an odd but very beautiful affection. He joins himself, as scout and general provider,-incidentally, also, as chela or disciple-to a saintly old lama from Thibet, "bound to the Wheel of Things," and roaming India in search of the Stream of Immortality.
But the subtlety of the East and the "faculty" of the West are blended in this terroe filius, this tricksy foundling of earth's oldest earth. Kim is, in fact and upon the surface, but an insignificant fragment of human history a bit out of the biography of a little vagabond of Irish parentage, orphaned when a baby, and left to shift for himself in infinite India. "Not much of a story" may perhaps be the verdict of the ruthless boy reader who revels in the Jungle Book and Captain Courageous, and derives an unholy gratification from Stalky & Co. Kipling's last work is, to my mind, his best, and not easily comparable with the work of any other man for it is of its own kind and of a novel kind, and fairly amazes one by the proof it affords of the author's magnificent versatility. There is a fine antidote to all manner of morbidness in the brilliant pages of Kim.
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