Published: Unpublished, unfinished. Perhaps written during or shortly after RK's crossing of the north Pacific, 11–28 May 1889. An encounter with a ‘monstrosity’ of an American boy earlier on the trip from India recorded in number 5 of the ‘From Sea to Sea’ letters may have contributed to ‘Sons of Belial’.

Attribution: The story is found in the second of two volumes of manuscript in RK's hand, containing stories and sketches written on RK's travels from India to England, March–October 1889. They are now in the Huntington Library. The notebooks have been described thus:

two manifold notebooks of 100 numbered leaves, each composed of alternating thin and thick paper, each pair being the same number, containing double carbon paper under thin and over thick leaf so that, writing with a stylographic pen, two carbon copies are made, one on verso of thin and one on recto of thick leaf (the thick leaves being detachable), both volumes now containing most of the thin and only a few of the thick leaves …

(Barbara Rosenbaum, Index of English Literary Manuscripts, iv, Part 2, 587)

All of the material in the notebooks was published by RK at various times except for two fragments, ‘Sons of Belial’ and ‘A Daughter of Heth’ (q.v.).

Text: Huntington Library, MS HM 12429.

Notes: The Huntington notebooks are described in Harbord, v, 2385, and in more detail by Barbara Rosenbaum, Index of English Literary Manuscripts, iv, Part 2, 587. Some guesses at illegible words have been supplied between square brackets.

“I had a notion” said the Major General as he watched his only deerstalker floating in the wake of the steamer, “that Anglo-Indian children were the worst in the world but upon m'honor [sic] they are sucking seraphs compared to these d—d trans-Atlantic devils. I shall have to wear a cricket cap for the rest of the voyage.”

The elder Schwammaker, aged ten, ran yelping with laughter to the shelter of the galley. He had crept behind the Major-General [sic] and twisted the old gentleman's hat into the sea. Pursuit was impossible. Mrs. Schwammaker, mother of the fiend, lazily raised her eyes from her work. She was knitting in a long chair smiled to her self but took no further notice of the outrage.