This volume recounts tales of St. Ives and Prussia Cove smugglers, a corrupted election (when a wealthy woman took advantage of an error to vote) and a developing friendship between a wealthy man and a fisherman due to the activities of the fisherman's granddaughter;

Now surpassed in fame as a writer by his daughter's best friend, Daphne du Maurier, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch ('Q') was the pre-eminent Cornish writer of Victorian & Edwardian times and founder of the Cambridge University school of English Literature.

Q is of particular interest since his fiction was very often based on factual events long passed from memory.