Opie Percival Read (1852-1939) was an American journalist and humorist born in Nashville, Tennessee who published around 60 books. He edited five separate newspapers, all in the Southern states, and in 1882 founded his own humor magazine, the Arkansas Traveler, which he carried on after leaving newspaper journalism in 1887. In that year he relocated to Chicago where he spent the remainder of his life and during his first 20 years there he published 54 separate books, of which 31 were novels, 18 were full-length compilations of short fiction such as that published in the Arkansas Traveler, and five were works of non-fiction. After 1908 he appears to have gone into semi-retirement, publishing only six further books over the last 30 years of his life. He is known for his command of Southern dialect, although his literary standing was affected by the fact that many of his works were published as dime novels, and later critics have dismissed him as a presenter of lower-class white Southern stereotypes for middle-class Northerners. This novel is reprinted from the edition of 1896 and includes two full-page illustrations and a facsimile of the original cover.