Ralph Delahaye Paine (1871-1925) owed part of his swashbuckling success as a writer to connections forged at Yale's secret society Skull and Bones and to an early friendship with the publisher William Randolph Hearst, for whom he covered the Spanish American War as well as the Boxer Rebellion in China. His philosophy in this and his other books was, "If we wish to scale Mont Blanc, or visit a thieves kitchen in the East End, or go down in a diving dress or up in a balloon, we must be about it while we are still young...Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other both in mind and body; to try the manners of different nations; to hear the chimes at midnight."