"Twelve months in any place, my friend, is quite a weary while And seems more like a century when lived on Sable Isle ..." So wrote Thomas Raddall at the age of eighteen, not dreaming that many years later Sable Island -- that "hell on earth" -- would provide a romantic background for one of his greatest novels, The Nymph and the Lamp. Traumatized by the horror of the great Halifax Explosion of 1917, followed in a few months by the death of his father in battle overseas, Tom was forced to leave school at the age of fourteen. This brief account of his life tells of his early adventures and of how he became one of Canada's most renowned storytellers.