Meredith Nicholson was an Indiana politician, diplomat and writer. During the first quarter of the 20th century he wrote poetry and prose. His works include The House of a Thousand Candles, The Port of Missing Men, and A Hoosier Chronicle. This espionage/adventure tale begins, "He trusted no one, and this accounted for his presence in Geneva in March, of the year 1903, whither he had gone to receive the report of the secret agents whom he had lately despatched to Paris on an errand of peculiar delicacy. The agents had failed in their mission, and Von Stroebel was not tolerant of failure. Perhaps if he had known that within a week the tapers would burn about his bier in Saint Stephen's Cathedral, at Vienna, while his life and public services would be estimated in varying degrees of admiration or execration by the newspapers of Europe, he might not have dealt so harshly with his hard-worked spies."