"Quite so," retorted the young woman, and there the conversation stopped.
I wonder if she was right? If I thought she was, I'd devote the rest of my life to seeing Ian Maclaren at home; but I can't help feeling that she was wrong. The man was so entirely courteous, after I finally cornered him, that I don't see how it could have been any one else than the one I sought; for, however much one may object to this popular author's dialect, England has sent us nothing finer in the way of a courteous gentleman than he.
[RUDYARD KIPLING]
An endeavor to find Rudyard Kipling at home is very much like trying to discover the North Pole. Most people have an idea that there is a North Pole somewhere, but up to the hour of going to press few have managed to locate it definitely. The same is true of Mr. Kipling's home. He has one, no doubt, somewhere, but exactly where that favored spot is, is as yet undetermined. My first effort to find him was at his residence in Vermont, but upon my arrival I learned that he had fled from the Green Mountain State in order to escape from the autograph-hunters who were continually lurking about his estate. Next I sought him at his lodgings in London, but the fog was so thick that if so be he was within I could not find him. Then taking a P. & O. steamer, I went out to Calcutta, and thence to Simla. In neither place was he to be found, and I sailed to Egypt, hired a camel, and upon this ship of the desert cruised down the easterly coast of Africa to the Transvaal, where I was informed that, while he had been there recently, Mr. Kipling had returned to London. I immediately turned about, and upon my faithful and wobbly steed took a short-cut catacornerwise across to Algiers, where I was fortunate enough to intercept the steamer upon which the object of my quest was sailing back to Britain.
INTERCEPTED THE STEAMER
He was travelling incog. as Mr. Peters, but I recognized him in a moment, not only by his vocabulary, but by his close resemblance to a wood-cut I had once seen in the advertisement of a famous dermatologist, which I had been told was a better portrait of Kipling than of Dr. Skinberry himself, whose skill in making people look unlike themselves was celebrated by the publication of the wood-cut in question.