Published: Scots Observer, 29 March 1890.

Attribution: Against this title in his annotated copy of Chandler's Summary RK has written: ‘not mine RK’. Livingston (Supplement, 111) says that ‘A Parable’ ‘has been identified as by Kipling’ but gives no reference. This is repeated by Roger Lancelyn Green in the Kipling Journal (October 1950, p. 5) and by Stewart–Yeats, Kipling, p. 541. I have been unable to discover any such identification.

‘A Parable’ is very much in the manner of several of Kipling's stories and poems in which personified groups, institutions, and abstractions engage in comic dialogue (e.g., ‘The Burden of Nineveh’, ‘A Horrible Scandal’, ‘In Wonderland’). Kipling was publishing regularly in William Ernest Henley's Scots Observer at the time ‘A Parable’ appeared, e.g., ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy’ on 15 March, ‘Oonts’ on 22 March, and ‘Loot’ on 29 March. The use of the word ‘skittles’ alone is enough to identify it as Kipling's. But these considerations do not outweigh RK's denial of authorship; ‘A Parable’ remains a doubtful attribution.

Text: Scots Observer.

Note: Reprinted in Harbord, v, 2463–6.

That very terrible deity the God of Things as They Are heard a noise on the floor beneath him, and saw the British Public racing round the room, upsetting the waste-paper basket, clawing the pictures from the walls, and trying to run about on the ceiling, like the fit-afflicted kitten. He is nothing if not “factual,” is the God of Things, etc.; and he has no great regard for the British Public, which is deeply tinctured with sentimentalism, and mostly takes its facts the wrong way. But being a god, he has a clear idea of duty; and tenderly he picked the British Public up, carefully he dusted the flue out of its coat, and even as if he meant it did he ask it what was the matter.

“Hush!” said the B.P. in some excitement, “We've got Art!”

“Then the sooner you get rid of it the better, because you are not built that way. And which is it this time? Print or paint?”