When Charles Scribner's Sons first published this book, way back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth, they described it this way: "This story is told by Will Gordon, a young fellow about sixteen years old, who saw for himself everything worth seeing in the course of the events he relates and so knows much more about them than anyone who would have to depend upon hearsay. Will is a good-looking boy, with brown hair and gray eyes, rather large for his age and very fond of being a leader among his young companions. Whether or not he is good at that sort of thing, you can judge from the story he tells." If it was us, today, writing the blurb, you'd hear all about the adventure that ensued (and you know there's an adventure -- after all, this is a book by Frank R. Stockton, the man who gave us all the Lady and her Tiger, the man who imaged up the Beeman of Orn, for goodness' sake!). But folks were prone to understatement way back in the days of the dinosaurs, so we'll just have to settle for that . . .

Author Biography

Frank Richard Stockton (1834 - 1902) was an American writer and humorist, best known today for a series of innovative children's fairy tales that were widely popular during the last decades of the 19th century. Stockton avoided the didactic moralizing common to children's stories of the time. Instead, he humorously poked fun at greed, violence, abuse of power and other human foibles, describing his fantastic characters' adventures in a charming, matter-of-fact way in stories like "The Griffin and the Minor Canon" (1885) and "The Bee-Man of Orn" (1887). These last two stories were republished in 1963 and 1964, respectively, in editions illustrated by Maurice Sendak. "The Griffin and the Minor Canon" won a Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1963. His 1895 adventure novel The Adventures of Captain Horn was the third-best selling book in the United States in 1895.