This is a tale of life beneath the sea, of mermaids and sea serpents and other strange inhabitants of the ocean depths. A little girl named Trot and Cap'n Bill, an old sailor, are invited by several mermaids to come and visit their under-water home. Baum wrote this story in the hope of interesting his readers in something other than Oz; in the preface he writes: "I hope my readers who have so long followed Dorothy's adventures in the Land of Oz will be interested in Trot's equally strange experiences. " Of course, he did not succeed in distracting his fans from Oz, yet the book was eagerly read; the result of this attempt was that he was forced to introduce Trot and Cap'n Bill into the later Oz stories.