Kipling's world-wide reputation was based, and to a large extent still rests, upon that group of stories of which this volume is one. They are the soldier stories which have immortalized the character of Private Mulvaney. In them are developed to their full strength all of Kipling's characteristic qualities—Promethean strength and energy, superabundant vitality, agressiveness, raciness of diction, freshness and originality of subject, in a word, that mode of style which has come to be known as literary Imperialism. Over and above all this, the volume reveals Kipling's supreme power to tell a short story so that it holds the reader as under a spell, the power without which he could never have attained his phenomenal popularity.