Recollections by David Christie Murray — Read

Whilst I was in Australia I found in the pages of the _Melbourne Argus_ a very remarkable poem and an equally remarkable prose story which had originally appeared in one of the great Anglo-Indian journals. They were alike anonymous, but it was quite evident that they came from the same hand. A few months later they were known to be the work of Rudyard Kipling; and when I returned to London the new writer was at the zenith of the literary firmament and was shining there like a comet. For the first few years of his career he looked inexhaustible, and whilst he was still at his most dazzling best, he produced a litde masterpiece of roaring farce which, for sheer broad fun and high animal spirits, surpasses anything else I know in English fiction. The story is called _Bruggksmith_.

I myself read it and still read it with intense enjoyment, dashed with a very singular surprise, for the principal episode in that story had actually happened to me some years before Mr Kipling told it, and I had related it scores and scores of times in public and in private. I have a theory about this matter which I shall here make it my business to unfold. But I must first relate my own adventure. It was between Christmas Day and New Year's Day, and I was dining quite alone in the Grand Hotel at Dunedin, when a stranger entered and took his seat beside me. I paid no heed to him at first, but by and by he laid a hand upon my sleeve and said: "I believe that you are Mr David Christie Murray? " I pleaded guilty and turning round to my companion found him to be a person of a sea-faring aspect with a stubbly beard of two or three days' growth.