The age-herald., 1901-03-17

success is his own account of it. Of his "Departmental Ditties" he says: "So they arrived merrily being born out Of the life about me; and they were very bad, in- deed and the joy of doing them was pay ment a thousand times their worth or the actual publication of thes first ditties away out in India, MT. Kipling says: So there was built a sort of a book. lean oblong docket, wire-stitched to initiate a D. O. Government envelope, printed on one side only, bound in brown paper and secured with red tape. Of these books we made some hundreds. The money came back in poor but honest rupees, and was transferred from the publisher left hand pocket direct to the author the right hand pocket" Very soon the book was issued in new and improved editions and finally ,'came to London with a gilt top and a stiff back and was ad- vertised in the publishers poetry depart ment." In writing of this first work though MT. Kipling always adds: But I loved it best when 1t was a little brown baby with pink string around it's stom- ach: a child's child. ignorant that 1t was afflicted with al the most modern ail- ments: and before people had learned be- yond doubt, how its author lay awake Of nights in India, plotting and schemlng to write something that should take with the English public" One of the brightest bits that Rudyard Kipling ever wrote was when he said in his American Notes that "Oliver Wendell Holmes said that the Yankee school marm, the cider and the salt codflsh of the Eastern States are responsible for what he calls a nasal accent, but I know better. They stole books from across the water without pay fFafr f.4f 1 t1.. fixed in their nostrils forever by just Providence. That Is why they talk a foreign tongue today" But. then, you know, when Klpling delivered himself of such biting piece of sarcasm he was suffering from grievance-the grievance of his pirated English books.
 And since those days of the piratad books and the American Notes" we have come to know each other better and are glad to pay handsomely for every ballad and ditty from the pen of Rudyard Kip ling. His life work Is well summed up In his well-known couplet:
 And only the Master shall praise us, and
 only the Master shall blame
 And no one shall work for money, and
 no one shall work for fame
 But each for the joy of the working, and
 each In his separate star.
 Shall draw the Thing as he sees it for
 the God of Things as they are.'
 Dr. A. Conan Doyle, the well-known au- thor of the now famous Sherlock Holmes," had many unhappy. pitlabe and unique experiences before success at last came to him. Speaking of Micah Clarke" Dr. Doyle said: House after house would have none of it. Blackwood found that people did not talk so in the seventeenth century; Bentley that its principal defect was that there was complete absence of interest; Cassals that experience had shown that a histori- cal novel could never be a commercial success. I remember smoking over my | dog-eared manuscript when it return ed for whff of country air after one of it's descents upon town and wondering what should do if some sporting, reckless kind of publisher were suddenly to stride in and make me bid of forty shillings or so for the lot. And then suddenly I l bethought me to send it to Messrs. Long mans, where it was fortunate enough to l fall into the hands of MT. Andred Lang door was now opened for me into the | temple of the Muses, and 1t only re- mained that I should find something that was worthy of being borne through l it."
 And so the story goes; sometimes extra | ordinary success and sometimes heart 1 breaking disappointments, until it looks much like fate in the shape of luck has a large share in the situation. Recently in this country so many phenomenal sue cesses have been achieved at once with an unknown authors first work that 1t has proven the greatest possible stlmu- lation to literary endeavor. And the end of these possible happy successes seems a long way off. PAUL PRY.