Saint John, New Brunswick: shipping money, a merchant's daughters, a fortune-hunter and a courtship conducted under the eyes of a small colonial city that misses nothing. Armour taught school in Fredericton and wrote some of the first novels to take New Brunswick seriously as a place where things happen. Read for a Canadian provincial society that almost no fiction of the period recorded at all. Fifty-eight plates by painters from Hokusai to Munch, their portraits, clippers and crowded salons echoing the merchant city and its watching eyes.
