What care they that the State should steer its course Call your Majority unto the polls Whom vote they for? The ablest and the best? Meaning by that, he who will truckle most, "I'm for plain, practical realities !" That is your cry; So you believe in numbers. I do not. Or at the least, a thousand ignorant men, Worth that of any one, however wise; I, that the one wise man outweighs them all. Where Power, Grace, Beauty dwell, and there alone, But what cry out your masses? Hear them brag This monument the tallest. Well! what then! If you desire a noble work of Art, Be it a poem, picture, statue, song, To whom do you intrust it? To the best! And has the highest art, the deftest skill. Thank God a few there be to keep us clean, Your voice of God, your people's voice,—and how? By thought of interest from the straight forthright, The dignity, the honor, that abjured All thought of party payments and rewards? Whose is the fault? What is the cause, my friend! The sturdiest trees must bend-must bend, or break, Are powerless, and the only real power This is your People with its voice of God! Its foolish judgments. Yet unto this vague So in this turbulent caldron of the world Which once informed us has been sapped and drained We worship now all otbers are but dreams Mere sounding names and phrases for effect. What we can see, taste, handle, purchase, sell, I hear you sneer, It harms me not, for, to confess the truth, You in Democracy. But, let us see, What mean these words ?-what is Democracy? Simply the plan that power, rule, government, Why, only that this self-same power should be Ah! from that hurrying, jostling, noisy world, How gladly even the worldliest of the crowd Stretched out beneath some broad and shadowy tree Into the realm of dreams! Now gazing up In the green branches hid,-while, fresh and pure No more are heard, and yet are dear and sweet Ah! here, my friend, in the dim woods, alone, -Blackwood's Magazine. THE INCARNATION OF KRISHNA MULVANEY. BY RUDYARD KIPLING. ་ ONCE upon a time, and very far from this land, lived three men who loved each other so greatly that neither man nor woman could come between them. They were in no sense refined, nor to be admitted to the outer door-mats of decent folk, because they happened to be private soldiers in Her Majesty's Army; and pri. vate soldiers of that employ have small time for self-culture. Their duty is to keep themselves and their accoutrements specklessly clean, to refrain from getting drunk more often than is necessary, to obey their superiors, and to pray for a All these things my friends accomplished; and of their own motion threw in some fighting-work for which the Army war. Regulations did not call. Their fate sent them to serve in India, which is not a golden country, though poets have sung otherwise. There men die with great swiftness, and those who live suffer many and curious things. I do not think that my friends concerned themselves much with the social or political aspects of the East. They attended a not unimportant war on the northern frontier, another one on our western boundary, and a third in Upper Burma. Then their regiment sat still to recruit, and the boundless monotony of cantonment life was their portion. They were drilled morning and evening on the same dusty parade-ground. They wandered up and down the same stretch of dusty white road, attended the same church and the same grog-shop, and slept in the same lime-washed barn of a barrack for two long years. There was Mulvaney, the father in the craft, who had served with various regiments from Bermuda to Halifax, old in war, scarred, reckless, resourceful, and in his pious hours an unequalled soldier. To him turned for help and comfort six and a half feet of slowmoving, heavy-footed Yorkshireman, born on the wolds, bred in the dales, and educated chiefly among the carriers' carts at the back of York railway-station. His nanie was Learoyd, and his chief virtue an unmitigated patience which helped him to win fights. How Ortheris, a fox-terrier of a Cockney, ever came to be one of the trio, is a mystery which even to day I cannot explain. "There was always three av us," Mulvaney used to say. "An' by the grace av God, so long as our service lasts, three av us they'll always be. 'Tis betther so." They desired no companionship beyond their own, and evil it was for any man of the regiment who attempted dispute with them. Physical argument was out of the question as regarded Mulvaney and the Yorkshireman; and assault on Ortheris meant a combined attack from these twain -a business which no five men were anxious to have on their hands. Therefore they flourished, sharing their drinks, their tobacco, and their money; good luck and evil; battle and the chances of death; life and the chances of happiness from Calicut in southern, to Peshawur in northern India. Through no merit of my own it was my good fortune to be in a measure admitted to their friendship-frankly by Mulvaney from the beginning, sullenly and with reluctance by Learoyd, and suspiciously by Ortheris, who held to it that no man not in the Army could fraternize with a red-coat. Like to like," said he. "I'm a bloomin' sodger-he's a bloomin' civilian. 'Tain't natural-that's all." 66 But that was not all. They thawed progressively, and in the thawing told me more of their lives and adventures than I am likely to find room for here. Omitting all else, this tale begins with the Lamentable Thirst that was at the beginning of First Causes. Never was such a thirst-Mulvaney told me so. They kicked against their compulsory virtue, but the attempt was only successful in the case of Ortheris. He, whose talents were many, went forth into the highways and stole a dog from a "civilian"-videlicet, some one, he knew not who, not in the Army. Now that civilian was but newly connected by marriage with the colonel of the regiment, and outcry was made from quarters least anticipated by Ortheris, and, in the end, he was forced, lest a worse thing should happen, to dispose at ridiculously unremunerative rates of as promising a small terrier as ever graced one end of a leading-string. The purchase-money was barely sufficient for one small outbreak which led him to the guard-room. He escaped, however, with nothing worse than a severe reprimand, and a few hours of punishment drill. Not for nothing had he acquired the reputation of being "the best soldier of his inches" in the regiment. Mulvaney had taught personal cleanliness and efficiency as the first articles of his companions' creed. "A dherty man," he was used to say, in the speech of his kind, "goes to clink for a weakness in the knees, an' is coort-martialed for a pair av socks missin'; but a clane man, such as is an ornament to his service-a man whose buttons are gold, whose coat is wax upon him, an' whose 'coutrements are widout a speck-that man may, spakin' in reason, do fwhat he likes an' dhrink from day to divil. That's the pride av bein' dacint." We sat together, upon a day, in the shade of a ravine far from the barracks, where a water-course used to run in rainy weather. Behind us was the scrub jungle, in which jackals, peacocks, the gray wolves of the North Western Provinces, and occasionally a tiger estrayed from Central India, were supposed to dwell. In front lay the cantonment, glaring white under a glaring sun; and on either side ran the broad road that led to Delhi. It was the scrub that suggested to my mind the wisdom of Mulvaney taking a day's leave and going upon a shootingtour. The peacock is a holy bird throughout India, and whoso slays one is in danger of being mobbed by the nearest villagers; but on the last occasion that Mulvaney had gone forth, he had contrived, without in the least offending local religious susceptibilities, to return with six beautiful peacock skins which he sold to profit. It seemed just possible then "But fwhat manner av use is ut to me |