themselves down upon the ground by the captured guns, when they noticed Mulcahy's charge. . . . The last of a hurrying crowd of Afghans turned at the noise of shod feet behind him, and shifted his knife ready to hand. This, he saw, was no time to take prisoners. Mulcahy tore on, sobbing; the straight-held blade went home through the defenceless breast, and the body pitched forward almost before a shot from Dan's rifle brought down the slayer. The two Irishmen went out to bring in their dead.'
'Description,' said Byron, in his riper time, when he had begun to understand himself a little, 'description is my forte.'
It is also Mr. Rudyard Kipling's.
II
The second of the four main features of the Anglo-Indian life is the domestic, and Mr. Kipling chooses The Story of the Gadsbys as his typical illustration of it. The difference, however, between the 'domestic' and the last of the four, which he calls the 'social' feature, is slight, and the latter term is quite comprehensive enough for the two. Here, indeed, he is on his special ground. Here his critical limitations do not come into play; his pet prejudices and theories are unaffected, and he sets himself to render Anglo-Indian 'society' as seen
