Rudyard Kipling is undoubtedly among the great short story writers in the English language. This collection opens with "The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows," the first story Kipling published as a young journalist in India, and ends with an acknowledged masterpiece, "The Gardener," written 50 years later in the aftermath of the Great War. The stories of the intervening years show an extraordinary range of subject matter and technique, from his exploration of the tragic loves of Englishmen and Indian women in "Lispeth" and "Without Benefit of Clergy" to political fables, like "The Mother Hive," and psychological case histories, such as "Mary Postgate." Above all, these stories reveal Kipling's ability to enter imaginatively into the minds of characters whose lives and values were radically different from his own-his willingness, as he himself once said, "to think in another man's skin."