Published: St James's Gazette, 30 November 1889.

Attribution: The story is referred to as by RK in a letter from Harold Macmillan, the publisher, to A. S. Watt, RK's agent, 13 August 1929, and by Watt to Mrs Kipling in a letter of 17 September 1929 (Kipling Papers, 22/4). It is included in a list of RK's works made for Scribner's and annotated by Mrs Kipling (British Library, Add. MS 54940). Since Gallihauk had been invented by RK in ‘The Comet of a Season’ in the St James's Gazette of 21 November, only nine days before this second appearance of Gallihauk, no one else could have written the story. It is remarkable that RK apparently acknowledged authorship of this story yet denied authorship of the closely related ‘Comet of a Season’.

Text: St James's Gazette.

Note: Reprinted in the Martindell–Ballard pamphlets and in Harbord, v, 2408–12.

He was occasionally called Ishmael, but more often referred to as above, his real name being Hognaston, which is just as bad and does not make a particle of difference.

Stewart-Atherley, who writes for the Eclectic Emporium and is arrayed in the borrowed fragments of a new creed every month, lisps that it was entirely Gallihauk's fault for taking an interest in a New Man. But Atherley would not stretch a hand to save living soul or body if he had to rise from his armchair to do it.

Gallihauk was greatly to be excused. He was a lonely soul, austere, and without any attachments, and chiefly at war with all his acquaintances. No one would have credited his taking up a New Man. No one more fiercely attacked the New men as they came up and went into the Outer Darkness where there is job-work and decay of power. It was a proverb in the Deucalion Club that whoso passed with a decent degree of success the double-shotted guns of Gallihauk would go far. His theory was that most new writers were possessed not with fancy but flux: and he was used to elaborate the theory offensively and medically in his own chair at the Deucalion.