Working at night and very fast, James De Mille wrote over twenty popular novels--"potboilers"--between 1861 and 1877. By day, he was the respected and respectable professor of rhetoric and history at Dalhousie University, Halifax, who taught his classes competently, and was working on a textbook of rhetoric for use in universities. The dichotomy is somewhat disturbing--as disturbing now, in fact, as it was to his colleagues, who barely knew what to make of him, although his students all remembered him with affection. De Mille does not reveal himself easily to the enquiring reader.

According to the best authority available, his tombstone, he was born on 23 August 1833, the third child of the ten born to Elizabeth and Nathan Smith De Mill (the original spelling of the name, which James changed sometime before 1865). His father had helped to found Horton Academy, a Baptist school that prepared boys to go on...