America, indeed, was full of romantic area, full of a truly romantic atmosphere, for it had been for centuries the battle-field of races, the North--England, New England, Anglo-Saxons--against the South--Spain, France, the slave-holding Cavaliers. And romance in all lands is the record of the old crushed out by the new, the dim tradition of a struggle between North and South: the South with its tropic imagination, its passion, its beauty, its imperious pride, its barbaric background; the North with its logic, its discipline, its perseverance, its passionless force. Romance has ever held as its theme the passing of an old Southern régime before the barbarians of the North. And romance in America has centered always in the South. Realism might flourish in Boston and the colder classical atmospheres, but not along the gulf and the tropic rivers. The reading public, however, and the great publishing houses were in the North. The result was compromise: the new romanticism, Southern in its atmosphere and spirit, Northern in its truth to life and conditions. I Harte in _Gabriel Conroy_ glimpsed the new fields of romance; George Washington Cable (1844----), the earliest of the new Southern school, was the first fully to enter them. His gateway was old New Orleans, most romantic of Southern cities, unknown to Northern readers until his pen revealed it. It seemed hardly possible that the new world possessed such a Bagdad of wonder: old Spanish aristocracy, French chivalry of a forgotten _ancien régime_, creoles, Acadians from the Grand Pré dispersion, adventurers from all the picturesque ports of the earth, slavery with its barbaric atmosphere and its shuddery background of dread, and behind it all and around it all like a mighty moat shutting it close in upon itself and rendering all else in the world a mere hearsay and dream, the swamps and lagoons of the great river. Cable was a native of the old city. During a happy boyhood he played and rambled over the whole of it and learned to know it as only a boy can know the surroundings of his home. His boyhood ended when he was fourteen with the death of his father and the responsibility that devolved upon him to help support his mother and her little family left with scanty means. There was to be no more schooling. He marked boxes in the custom house until the war broke out, and then at seventeen he enlisted in the Confederate army and served to the end. Returning to New Orleans, he found employment in a newspaper office, where he proved a failure; he studied surveying until he was forced by malarial fever caught in the swamps to abandon it; then, after a slow recovery, he entered the employ of a firm of cotton factors and for years served them as an accountant. It was an unpromising beginning. At thirty-five he was still recording transfers of cotton, and weights and prices and commissions.