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. 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."

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