Amazon.com description: Product Description: Stockton, who lived from 1834 to 1902, was author of such other popular works as Rudder Grange and John Gayther's Garden. Novelist Frank R. Stockton, in Stories of New Jersey, sets out in narrative form the history of Garden State -- beginning with the meetings in the Council House of the Lenape or "Grandfather Tribe," the landing of Henry Hudson at Bergen Point, and the colony-making efforts of the West India Company of Holland. On his way toward modern times, Stockton stops to take in the most interesting and colorful tales from city and country -- such as that of Penelope Stout, shipwrecked and then attacked by a party of natives, who then manages to survive within a hollowed-out tree -- or that of the schoolmaster who discovers his one-room schoolhouse is turning into a gambling house in the dead of night!