The theme of this collection is friendship. Each of the five stories reflects on a different aspect or type of friendship. Mansfield’s and Joyce’s stories both depict childhood friendships in the early 1900s. Mansfield describes friendship between girls against a background of traditional small-town mentality in New Zealand, while Joyce focuses on friendships between schoolboys in Dublin. Wilde’s tale questions the nature of true adult friendship, Tagore’s The Kabuliwala explores friendship between different cultures, classes and generations, and Twain writes about man’s best friend and the bond between humans and animals.