of all Indian newspapers published in the interior of the country.

For five years he worked hard and steadily on the Gazette. Much of the work was simple drudgery. He shirked nothing. The editor-in-chief was a somewhat grim man, who believed in snubbing his subordinates, and who, though he recognized the talents of the "clever pup," as he called him, and allowed him a pretty free hand in his contributions to the paper, yet was inclined to exact from him the full tale of the heavy routine work of a newspaper office.

But these were happy years. For the youth was[xiii] feeling the spring of his own powers, was full of interest in life, was laying up stores of observation and experience, and found in his own home not only domestic happiness, but a sympathy in taste and a variety of talent and accomplishment which acted as a continual stimulus to his own genius. Father, mother, sister, and brother all played and worked together with rare combination of sympathetic gifts. In 1885 some of the verses with the writing of which he and his sister had amused themselves were published at Lahore, in a little volume entitled "Echoes," because most of them were lively parodies on some of the poems of the popular poets of the day. The little book had its moment of narrowly limited success and opened the way for the wider notoriety and success of a volume into which were gathered the "Departmental Ditties" that had appeared from time to time in the Gazette. Many of the stories also which were afterward collected under the now familiar title of "Plain Tales from the Hills" made their first appearance in the Gazette, and attracted wide attention in the Anglo-Indian community.

[xiii]

Kipling's work for five years at Lahore had indeed been of such quality that it was not surprising that he was called down to Allahabad, in 1887, to take a place upon the editorial staff of the Pioneer. The training of an Anglo-Indian journalist is peculiar. He has to master knowledge of many kinds, to become thoroughly acquainted with the affairs of the[xiv] English administration and the conditions of Anglo-Indian life, and at the same time with the interests, the modes of life, and thought of the vast underlying native population. The higher positions in Indian journalism are places of genuine importance and of large emolument, worthy objects of ambition for a young man conscious of literary faculty and inspired with zeal for public ends.

[xiv]

The Pioneer issued a weekly as well as a daily edition, and in 

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