THE LADY OR THE TALKER? Really and truly, all our hero wants is someone to listen to him! You see, it's quite simple. He had a wonderful time in Europe. He wants to tell folks back in the States all his adventures. But our hero, in the nineteenth century, confronts a problem that has only gotten worse in the twenty-first. ". . . the ears of the present generation are not purveyors to the mind; they are merely agents of the tongue, who watch for breaks or weak places in the speech of others in order that their principal may rush in and hold the field . . . the conviction came to me that nowadays we listen only for an opportunity to speak." What to do, oh what to do? Well -- why not hire someone to listen to him! Why not that pretty young lady from that Protestant charitable order! Oh dear! Can aught but misadventures and daffy romance be in the offing? Find out in this delightful treat from the pen of the author of "The Lady or the Tiger."

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.