Page [179]. "Time was that when the brains were out": a misquotation from Shakespeare's "Macbeth," Act III, scene iv, lines 78-79. In full this most apposite reference runs:
"The times have been,
That, when the brains were out, the man would die,
And there an end; but now they rise again,
With twenty mortal murders on their crowns,
And push us from our stools: this is more strange
Than such a murder is."
[180]. Bohemian goblets: drinking glasses of glass made in Bohemia, the most northern portion of the Empire of Austria-Hungary. Its glassware is famous.
[182]. Brownrigg: Elizabeth Brownrigg, a notorious English murderess of the eighteenth century. Pictures of such persons were common at country fairs. Mannings: other murderers, man and wife. Thurtell: another murderer and his victim.
[185]. other murderers: compare the agonies of Bill Sykes in "Oliver Twist."
[186]. Sheraton sideboard: Thomas Sheraton (1751-1806) was a well-known English furniture maker. Jacobean tombs: graves of the times of the English kings named James of the seventeenth century.
[187]. a face was thrust into the aperture: This was not a real person but one born of Markheim's troubled mind. The conversation shows the dual nature of man, containing both good and bad, and how a man excuses his wickedness. The subject was used again by Stevenson in "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."
RUDYARD KIPLING
Rudyard Kipling is the son of John Lockwood Kipling, successively Professor in the Bombay School of Art and Curator of the Government Museum at Lahore, India, and of Alice Macdonald, the daughter of a Wesleyan minister. He was born at Bombay, December 30, 1865. His given name commemorates the meeting-place of his parents, a small lake in Staffordshire.
In accordance with the custom dictated by the needs of health and of education in the case of white children born in India, he was taken in 1871 to England, where he stayed with a relative at Southsea, near Portsmouth. The experiences of such little exiles from the home circle are feelingly shown in "Baa, Baa, Black-sheep" and in the beginning of "The Light that Failed." When thirteen he entered The United Services College, Westward Ho, Bideford, North Devon. Here he stayed from 1878 to 1882, taking part in some at least of the happenings so well narrated in "Stalky and Co." (1899).