WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY RUDYARD KIPLING'S (1865-) first volume of Short Stories was Plain Tales from the Hills (1888). After the publication of that volume his work may be said to have steadily grown in power until the publication of Life's Handicap (1891), which probably marks the apogee both of his art and of his reputation. Perhaps since then he has done work as good, but the best stories of that volume have not since been surpassed either by Kipling or by any other English writer; for Life's Handicap contains these masterpieces: The Courting of Dinah Shadd (1890), The Man Who Was (1890), Without Benefit of Clergy (1890), At the End of the Passage (1891). The most important of Kipling's remaining Short Stories perhaps are: The Man Who Would Be King (1888), The Drums of the Fore and Aft (1888), Beyond the Pale (1888), The Brushwood Boy (1895), They (1904), and the stories contained in The Jungle Books (1894– 1895), Puck of Pook's Hill (1904), and Rewards and Fairies (1910). Without Benefit of Clergy was first published in the June, 1890, number of Macmillan's Magazine (London), and in the June 7th and 14th numbers of Harper's Weekly (New York), 1890. Later in the same year it was republished in the volume entitled The Courting of Dinah Shadd, and Other Stories. In 1891 it was republished in the volume, Life's Handicap. Certainly it is unsurpassed among Kipling's Short Stories; it strongly presents both his chief merits and his particular characteristics. The tremulous passion of Ameera," says Edmund Gosse, 66 "her hopes, her fears, and her agonies of disappointment, combine to form by far the most tender page which Mr. Kipling has written." Love stories of such rank as this have been given us only by the greatest writers, and that Kipling has added one to the not too large anthology is testimony both to his genius and to the power of the modern Short Story. AUTHORITIES: Rudyard Kipling: A Criticism, by Richard Le Gallienne; with a bibliography by John Lane. Questions at Issue, by Edmund Gosse. A Kipling Primer, by Frederic L. Knowles. The Short Story in English, by Henry Seidel Canby (Chapter XVIII). WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY Before my Spring I garnered Autumn's gain, I saw the sunset ere men saw the day, Who am too wise in that I should not know. Bitter Waters. "But if it be a girl?" 'Lord of my life, it cannot be. I have prayed for so many nights, and sent gifts to Sheikh Badl's shrine so often, that I know God will give us a son-a man-child that shall grow into a man. Think of this and be glad. My mother shall be his mother till I can take him again, and the mullah of the Pattan mosque shall cast his nativity-God send he be born in an auspicious hour!-and then, and then thou wilt never weary of me, thy slave." "Since when hast thou been a slave, my queen?" Since the beginning-till this mercy came to me. How could I be sure of thy love when I knew that I had been bought with silver?" 66 Nay, that was the dowry. I paid it to thy mother." "And she has buried it, and sits upon it all day long like a hen. What talk is yours of dower! I was bought as though I had been a Lucknow dancing-girl instead of a child." "I have sorrowed; but to-day I am glad. Thou wilt never cease to love me now?-answer, my king." 66 Never-never. No." "Not even though the mem-log-the white women of thy |