The adventures of an orphaned young man in Victorian England who is given a great deal of money by an unknown benefactor to enable him to live as a gentleman, pursuing a good education and fulfilling great expectations.

The author's grandfather, Sam Stone, placed an ad in the Canton, OH, newspaper shortly before Christmas in 1933, offering cash gifts to seventy-five families in distress. Readers were asked to send letters describing their hardships to a benefactor calling himself Mr. B. Virdot. The author investigates a suitcase full of letters responding to these ads as he learns more about his grandfather's hidden past as well as the suffering and triumphs of strangers...