Action Fraser, W. A: The Three Sapphires. v1. 16 Feb 2013

[crutledge]

W. A. Fraser: (1859–1933) married (1889) Jessie Maud Barber. A Canadian novelist and inventor, he was born in Nova Scotia of Scots parents and educated at Westchester. He worked as a mining engineer in India, Burma, and Canada, before taking to writing and broadcasting animal stories. Thoroughbreds: A Sporting Novel (1903) is concerned with horse-racing in America. The plot hinges on a sinister banker trying to ruin the honest trainer by drugging horses with cocaine; the climax is when the trainer's lovely daughter disguises herself as a jockey in order to win the crucial race. Mooswa and Others of the Boundaries (1900) is a series of derivative animal stories (after Kipling) about Mooswa the Moose, protector of the Boy who is the son of the Hudson's Bay Company's factor in a remote area of Canada.

Excerpt
"Yes; once an avaricious nawab got together several elephants and many men, and, fastening to the cable, started to pull the boat up. It came easily at first, but just when they all got very careless and were starting to rush it the magic thing slipped back, pulling them in, and they were all drowned. There's a legend that if a holy man stands here at midnight of a full moon when the mhowa tree is in bloom, with the three sacred sapphires of our mythology in his hand, the king will rise in his golden boat if the holy man has been ordained of the gods to be a leader of his people."

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