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and cure them. This herb has also the virtue to cut iron- -everything it touches."

"What absurdities this José swallows without chewing, like a real shark!" interrupted Manuel, laughing. "Don Frederico, do you comprehend what he said and believes as an article of faith? He believes and says that snakes never die."

"No, they never die," replied the shepherd. "When they see death coming they escape from their skin, and run away. With age they become serpents; little by little they are covered with scales and wings: they become dragons, and return to the desert. But you, Manuel, you do not wish to believe anything. Do you deny also that the lizard is the enemy of the woman, and the friend of man? If you do not believe it, ask then of Miguel."

"He knows it?"

"Without doubt, by experience."

"Whence did he learn it?" demanded Stein.

"He was sleeping in the field," replied José. "A snake glided near him. A lizard, which was in the furrow, saw it coming, and presented himself to defend Miguel. The lizard, which was of large form, fought with the snake. But Miguel not awaking, the lizard pressed his tail against the nose of the sleeper, and ran off as if his paws were on fire. The lizard is a good little beast, who has good desires; he never sleeps in the sun without descending the wall to kiss the earth."

When the conversation commenced on the subject of swallows, Paca said to Anis, who was seated among his sisters, with his legs crossed like a Grand Turk in miniature, «Anis, do you know what the swallows say?"

"I? No. They have never spoken to me."

>>

"Attend then: they say the little girl imitated the chirping of swallows, and began to sing with volubility:

"To eat and to drink!

And to loan when you may;

But 'tis madness to think

This loan to repay.

Flee, flee, pretty swallow, the season demands,
Fly swift on the wing, and reach other lands."

"Is it for that they are sold?”
"For that," affirmed his sister.

During this time Dolores, carrying her infant in one hand, with the other spread the table, served the potatoes, and distributed to each one his part. The children ate from her plate, and Stein remarked that she did not even touch the dish she had prepared with so much care.

"You do not eat, Dolores?" he said to her.

"Do you not know the saying," she replied laughing, "He who has children at his side will never die of indigestion,' Don Frederico? What they eat nourishes me.''

Momo, who found himself beside this group, drew away his plate, so that his brothers would not have the temptation to ask him for its contents. His father, who remarked it, said to him:

"Don't be avaricious; it is a shameful vice: be not avaricious; avarice is an abject vice. Know that one day an avaricious man fell into the river. A peasant who saw it, ran to pull him out; he stretched out his arm, and cried to him, 'Give me your hand!' What had he to give? A miser-give! Before giving him anything he allowed himself to be swept down by the current. By chance he floated near to a fisherman: Take my hand!' he said to him. As it was a question of taking, our man was willing, and he escaped danger."

"It is not such wit you should relate to your son, Manuel," said Maria. "You ought to set before him, for example, the bad rich man, who would give to the unfortunate neither a morsel of bread nor a glass of water. 'God grant,' answered the beggar to him, 'that all that you touch changes to this silver which you so hold to. The wish of the beggar was realized. All that the miser had in his house was changed into metals as hard as his heart. Tormented by hunger and thirst, he went into the country, and having perceived a fountain of pure water, clear as crystal, he approached with longing to taste it; but the moment his lips touched it the water was turned to silver. He would take an orange and the orange was changed to gold. He thus died in a frenzy of rage and fury, cursing what he had desired." Manuel, the strongest minded man in the assembly, bowed down his head.

"Manuel," his mother said to him, "you imagine that we ought not to believe but what is a fundamental article, and that credulity is common only to the imbecile. You are mistaken: men of good sense are credulous. "

"But, my mother, between belief and doubt there is a medium."

"And why," replied the good old woman, "laugh at faith, which is the first of all virtues? How will it appear to you if I say to you, 'I have given birth to you, I have educated you, I have guided your earliest steps-I have fulfilled my obligations! Is the love of a mother nothing but an obligation? What say you?"

"I would reply that you are not a good mother."

"Well, my son, apply that to what we were speaking of: he who does not believe except from obligation, and only for that, cannot cease to believe without being a renegade, a bad Christian; as I would be a bad mother if I loved you only from obligation."

"Brother Gabriel," interrupted Dolores, "why will you not taste my potatoes?"

"It is a fast-day," replied Brother Gabriel.

"Nonsense! There is no longer convent, nor rules, nor fasts,” cavalierly said Manuel, to induce the poor old man to participate in the general repast. "Besides, you have accomplished sixty years: put away these scruples, and you will not be damned for having eaten our potatoes.'

"Pardon me,” replied Brother Gabriel, "but I ought to fast as formerly, inasmuch as the Father Prior has not given me a dispensation."

"Well done, Brother Gabriel!" added Maria; "Manuel shall not be the demon tempter with his rebellious spirit, to incite you to gormandize.”

Upon this, the good old woman rose up and locked up in a closet the plate which Dolores had served to the monk.

"I will keep it here for you until to-morrow morning, Brother Gabriel."

Supper finished, the men, whose habit was always to keep their hats on in the house, uncovered, and Maria said grace.

GEORGE W. CABLE

(1844-)

ERHAPS the first intimation given to the world of a literary and artististic awakening in the Southern States of America

after the Civil War, was the appearance in Scribner's Magazine of a series of short stories, written by an unknown and hitherto untried hand, and afterward collected and republished in Old Creole Days.' This was long before the vogue of the short story; and that the publication of these tales was regarded as a literary event in those days is sufficient testimony to their power.

They were fresh, full of color and poetic feeling-romantic with the romance that abounds in the life they portrayed, redolent of indigenous perfumes,-magnolia, lemon, orange, and myrtle, mingled with French exotics of the boudoir,-interpretive in these qualities, through a fine perception, of a social condition resulting from the transplanting to a semi-tropical soil of a conservative, wealthy, and aristocratic French community. Herein lay much of their most inviting charm; but more than this, they were racy with twinkling humor, tender with a melting pathos, and intensely dramatic.

GEORGE W. CABLE

An intermixture of races with strong caste prejudices, and a time of revolution and change, present eminently the condition and the moment for the romance. And when added to this, he finds to his hand an almost tropical setting, and so picturesque a confusion of liquid tongues as exists in the old Franco-Spanish-Afro-Italian-American city of New Orleans, there would seem to be nothing left to be desired as "material." The artist who seized instinctively this opportunity was born at New Orleans on October 12th, 1844, of colonial Virginia stock on the one side, and New England on the other. His early life was full of vicissitudes, and he was over thirty before he discovered story-telling to be his true vocation. From that time he has diligently followed it, having published three novels, 'The Grandissimes,' 'Dr. Sevier,' 'Bonaventure,' and 'John March, Southerner,' besides another volume of short stories.

That having received his impressions in the period of transition. and ferment following the upheaval of 1861-1865, with the resulting exaggerations and distortions of a normal social condition, he chose to lay his scenes a half-century earlier, proclaims him still more the artist; who would thus gain a freer play of fancy and a surer perspective, and who, saturated with his subject, is not afraid to trust his imagination to interpret it.

That he saw with open sympathetic eyes and a loving heart, he who runs may read in any chance page that a casual opening of his books will reveal. That the people whom he has so affectionately depicted have not loved him in return, is perhaps only a corroboration of his own words when he wrote, in his charming tale 'Belles Demoiselles Plantation,' "The Creoles never forgive a public mention." That they are tender of heart, sympathetic, and generous in their own social and domestic relations, Mr. Cable's readers cannot fail to know. But the caste line has ever been a dangerous boundary -a live wire charged with a deadly if invisible fluid — and he is a brave man who dares lay his hand upon it.

More than this, the old-time Creole was an aristocrat who chose to live behind a battened door, as does his descendant to-day. His privacy, so long undisturbed, has come to be his prerogative. Witness this spirit in the protest of the inimitable Jean-ah Poquelinthe hero giving his name to one of the most dramatic stories ever penned - when he presents himself before the American governor of Louisiana to declare that he will not have his privacy invaded by a proposed street to pass his door:-"I want you tell Monsieur le President, strit — can't — pass — at — me —'ouse." The Creoles of Mr. Cable's generation are as jealous of their retirement as was the brave old man Poquelin; and to have it invaded by a young American who not only threw their pictures upon his canvas, but standing behind it, reproduced their eccentricities of speech for applauding Northern audiences, was a crime unforgivable in their moral code.

Added to this, Mr. Cable stands accused of giving the impression that the Louisiana Creole is a person of African taint; but are there not many refutations of this charge in the internal evidence of his work? As for instance where in The Grandissimes' he writes, "His whole appearance was a dazzling contradiction of the notion that a Creole is a person of mixed blood"; and again when he alludes to "the slave dialect," is the implication not unequivocal that this differed from the speech of the drawing-room? It is true that he found many of his studies in the Quadroon population, who spoke a patois that was partly French; but such was the "slave dialect» of the man of color who came into his English through a French strain, or perhaps only through a generation of close French environment.