Distant lands, the beautiful gardens of splendid palaces, the sea, the jungle and its beasts, even the desert, are the wonderfully exotic settings for the Just So Stories. Inspired by Kipling's natural empathy with the animal world and by his delight in the foibles and the weaknesses of human nature, they are breathtakingly imaginative fables whose subjects range from the animals themselves to the origins of things. The stories are linked by poems and scattered with the author's own illustrations, which, with their hidden jokes and puzzles, add an intriguing dimension to the volume. Though written for children, the Just So Stories are so strikingly apt and the style so idiosyncratically rich that the book has become a classic transcending the boundaries of age.