On reaching the school age, young Kipling was sent to England to be educated, as was the custom among the English residents of India. He was educated in the United Services College, returning home at the age of eighteen.
It was his ambition to become a writer and he secured employment on the “Civil and Military Gazette.” His work here familiarized him with the life in the garrisons, which he afterwards turned to good account in his ballads and short stories.
He was twenty-one years old when he became assistant editor of the “Lahore Journal.” It was a strange newspaper office, judging by accounts which he has given us of it. There were native type-setters and a queer Mohammedan foreman. In a story which he wrote, called “The Man Who Would be King,” Kipling tells how they worked in the stifling Indian heat.
From time to time Kipling published verses and stories in the local paper, and when these had been gathered together and sent out into the world in the form of a book called “Plain Tales from the Hills,” the name of the young author and poet became famous.
He then went to England and made his home in London. He wrote many stories and poems of the old life in India, one of the best collections of which is the “Barrack-Room Ballads.”
In London he met Walcott Balestier, of Brattleboro, Vt., and they wrote stories together until Balestier’s death. Not long after, Kipling married Caroline Balestier. They came to this country and lived for a time in Vermont, where the poet surrounded himself with everything that would remind him of the life in India.
Among other works of Kipling are “Soldiers Three,” “The Phantom ‘Rickshaw, and Other Stories,” the two Jungle Books, and “The Day’s Work.”
At the time of Queen Victoria’s jubilee, Kipling wrote what was perhaps his greatest poem, the “Recessional,” which was published in “The London Times.”