Soldiers Three. A Collection Of Stories, Setting forth certain Passages in the Lives and Adventures of Privates Terence Mulvaney, Stanley Ortheris, and John Learoyd. Done into type and edited by Rudyard Kipling

Allahabad, India): Printed at the Pioneer Press, 1888. First edition, first issue with no periods after "No" & "Library" & no cross-hatching on the barracks-door on the front wrapper. Issued as the first number of A. H. Wheeler's Indian Railway Library series. Stewart 28. Presentation copy, inscribed by Kipling on the front free endpaper to his first love & former fiancee, (Violet) Flo Garrard: "F. G. from R. K. Jan: 90". Kipling was twenty-five years old at the time & had been in love with Flo Garrard, then a student at the Slade Art School, for eleven years. "He idolized her as a Pre-Raphaelite heroine . . . Where and how often Flo and Rudyard met was their own secret. He was faithful to her image for five or six years at least, and hard-hit when he met her long afterwards. When he was ordered off to India, he begged her to consent to an engagement - he was then sixteen and she seventeen or eighteen. . . . Eighteen months after his departure from London, about July 1884, Flo Garrard wrote to put an end to the engagement." - Carrington, The Life of Rudyard Kipling, pp. 42-43. In Dec. 1885, Kipling wrote to Margaret Burne-Jones: "In the course of your wanderings do you ever come to know anything about the Slade Art School and the students there - the female ones I mean of course - There is or was a maiden there of the name of Garrard - Flo Garrard and I want to know, how she is and what she is doing - I want you as quietly and as unobtrusively as possible to learn all you can about the girl - am at my wits end for news . . . - I want only to know if the girl looks well and - so far as your eyes can judge - happy. Thereafter if I can serve you in any way you know who to go to." - quoted by Carrington, p. 56. Kipling returned from India in October 1899 & early in 1890, Kipling's affection for her ". . . was revived . . . by a chance encounter in a London fog, described in The Light That Failed. . . . There can be no serious doubt that Dick's pursuit of Maisie is based on Rudyard's of Flo Garrard . . ." - Mason, Kipling: The Glass, The Shadow & The Fire, pp. 50, 92. Kipling's gift of the Indian edition (the English edition was also published in 1890) to Flo Garrard must date from the time of their reunion. Wrappers expertly and archivally repaired, back wrapper scuffed, otherwise a very good copy in a full red morocco pull-off case. 8vo, original pictorial wrappers. Wrappers expertly and archivally repaired, back wrapper scuffed, otherwise a very good copy in a full red morocco pull-off case.