Here is a set of quotations for this week (April 22nd to 28th):

1. Matkah taught him to follow the cod and the halibut along the under-sea banks, and wrench the rockling out of his hole among the weeds; how to skirt the wrecks lying a hundred fathoms below water, and dart like a rifle-bullet in at one port-hole and out at another as the fishes ran; how to dance on the top of the waves when the lightning was racing all over the sky, and wave his flipper politely to the stumpy-tailed Albatross and the Man-of-war Hawk as they went down the wind ...; to take the shoulder-piece out of a cod at full speed ten fathoms deep; and never to stop and look at a boat or a ship.

2. "The village was deep in flood, and I swam above the Ghaut and went far inland, up to the rice-fields, and they were deep in good mud. I remember also a pair of bracelets (glass they were, and troubled me not a little) that I found that evening. Yes, glass bracelets; and, if my memory serves me well, a shoe. I should have shaken off both shoes, but I was hungry. I learned better later. Yes. And so I fed and rested me; but when I was ready to go to the river again the flood had fallen, and I walked through the mud of the main street."

3. Some six or seven feet above the port bulwarks, framed in fog, and as utterly unsupported as the full moon, hung a Face. It was not human, and it certainly was not animal, for it did not belong to this earth as known to man. The mouth was open, revealing a ridiculously tiny tongue—as absurd as the tongue of an elephant; there were tense wrinkles of white skin at the angles of the drawn lips, white feelers like those of a barbel sprung from the lower jaw, and there was no sign of teeth within the mouth. But the horror of the face lay in the eyes, for those were sightless' .

The sources of the last set of extracts (April 6th to 12th) are as follows:

1.  ('...Hark ye, Ben. Here is the sun going up to over-run and possess all Heaven for evermore. Therefore (Still, man!) we'll harness the horses of the dawn...) This is from "Proofs of Holy Writ", Kipling's last story, in which Ben Jonson and Will Shakespeare are discussing how best to render a passage from Isaiah into English.

2.  (...Then he wrote, muttering: "the little smoke of a candle that goes out." ...then with relief, "the little smoke that dies in moonlight cold.")  This is from 'Wireless', collected in A Diversity of Creatures. In a pharmacist's shop, the young assistant, wracked by consumption, is labouring with a poem about his beloved. He 'finds' the very words of the poet Keats.

3.  ( ... "How is he chained?"  "With an iron band round his waist fixed to the bench he sits on, and a sort of handcuff on his left wrist chaining him to the oar....")  This is from 'The Finest Story in the World' collected in Many Inventions.  Charlie Mears, a young bank clerk with literary ambitions, has been encouraged to write by the story teller, and  rediscovers his past life as a Greek galley slave, two thousand years before.

In the New Readers' Guide we have very nearly completed notes on all the poems collected in Definitive Verse. Meanwhile, Alastair Wilson, editing the extracts from Carrie Kipling's diaries, has added the Rees extracts for 1892 and 1893 to those by Carrington. They cover the same ground, but there are often interesting differences. 

Good wishes to all

John R