WATCHES OF THE NIGHT

Joseph Rudyard Kipling   was an English short-story writer, poet, and novelist. Не was one of the most popular writers in England, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He wrote tales and poems of British soldiers in India and stories for children, and he also was the first to use Cockney dialect in serious poetry. 
Watches of the Night is a short story, which was first published in the “Civil and Military Gazette” and in the many subsequent editions of that collection. It is one of the "Tales" which deals with the tense, enclosed society of the British in India, and the levels of gossip and malice that could be engendered therein. Like many of Kipling's works, it has a punning, allusive title. The phrase 'watches of the night' has been used since at least the Book of Common Prayer. Both the Colonel, commanding the regiment, and a Subaltern in the Regiment, Platte, a poor man, own Waterbury watches… What is next? The story will tell!