A young couple, unable to afford a house, buy a derelict canal boat and set up in it — with a hired girl of alarming competence, a dog, a boarder, and eventually a burglar. Stockton was a wood engraver before he wrote The Lady, or the Tiger?, the most argued-over story in American literature; this 1879 book was his first success, and Pomona, the servant who reads sensation novels and acts on them, is one of the great comic creations.