Published: Pages from ‘The Merry Thought’ [Vernet-les-Bains], May 1911.

Attribution: The story is accompanied by a letter from Kipling, 16 March 1911, to the editor of the magazine enclosing ‘a contribution to your valuable paper’ (story and letter printed in Pages from ‘The Merry Thought’).

Text: Typescript copy, Kipling Papers, Special Collections, University of Sussex (SxMs 38/2/8/1/6/1). This text is preferred to the printed version in Pages from the Merry Thought, since RK evidently saw the typescript. No copy of the issue of the magazine for April 1911, in which the story was first published, appears to have survived. Pages from ‘The Merry Thought’ is a selection from the issues for February, March and April 1911. For a description of this pamphlet, see Richards, Bibliography, pp. 389–90.

Notes: The magazine was published in Vernet-les-Bains, a spa at the foot of the Pyrenees, to ‘amuse’ the patrons. RK and his wife stayed at Vernet on three occasions, in 1910, 1911 and 1914. They arrived at Vernet on 20 February 1911 when ‘the snow lay in two foot patches beside the roads’. After an interval of ‘glorious weather’ it ‘snowed again and thawed. Since which the weather has had worms’ (to Stanley Baldwin, 18 March 1911: Letters, iv, 25).

Reprinted in the Martindell–Ballard pamphlets and by H. Dunscombe Colt, December 1963, in an edition of fifty copies (Richards, Bibliography, p. 339).

I had this legend from the Rock which rises behind the laurestine bush and the loquat tree, in the winter garden. Shortly after the end of the first crusade, so the Rock told me, there came to Vernet, wearied by war and seeking a quiet life, two English knights – Sir Brian and Sir Gilbert, the one round and reddish, the other long and dark; the one limping from an inveterate sciatica, the other bowed in his saddle by an ancient lumbago. They arrived separately: Sir Brian on a Monday, Sir Gilbert on a Thursday.

Sir Brian, after the simple usage of those days, possessed himself of the ground, where the Vernet hotels now stand; Sir Gilbert, the later arrival, contenting himself with the pleasant fields round Casteil. Here, in a silence as profound as that of the mountains above, each devoted himself to the planting of vines and fruit trees, and the cure of his ailment.