One evening, Euphemia and I were sitting, rather disconsolately, in our room, and I was reading out the advertisements of country board in a newspaper, searching for a home, when in rushed Dr. Heare - one of our old friends. He was so full of something that he had to say that he didn't even ask us how we were. In fact, he didn't appear to want to know. "I tell you what it is," said he, "I have found just the very thing you want. A canal-boat." - To live in? A canal-boat for a home? We sat up until twenty minutes past two, talking about that house. We ceased to call it a boat at about a quarter of eleven.

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.