But his heart, like Charles Lamb's, was in volumes far different from those upon his office desk. He had always been a studious youth. He had read much: Dickens, Thackeray, Poe, Irving, Scott; and, like a true native of the old city to whom French was a mother tongue, Hugo, Mérimée, About. He loved also to pore over antiquarian records: _Relations_ of the priest explorers, and old French documents and writings. His first impulse to write came to him as he sat amid these dusty records. "It would give me pleasure," he once wrote in a letter, "to tell you how I came to drop into the writing of romances, but I cannot; I just dropt. Money, fame, didactic or controversial impulse I scarcely felt a throb of. I just wanted to do it because it seemed a pity for the stuff to go so to waste." Cable's first story, "'Sieur George," appeared in _Scribner's Monthly_ in October, 1873. Edward King, touring the Southern States in 1872 for his series of papers entitled _The Great South_, had found the young accountant pottering away at his local history and his studies of local conditions and had secured some of his work for Dr. Holland. During the next three years five other articles were published in the magazine and one, "Posson Jone," in _Appleton's_, but they caused no sensation. It was not until 1879, when the seven stories were issued in book form as _Old Creole Days_, that recognition came. The long delay was good for Cable: it compelled him, in Hawthorne fashion, to brood over his early work in his rare intervals of leisure, to contemplate each piece a long time, and to finish it and enrich it. He put forth no immaturities; he began to publish at the point where his art was perfect. The reception accorded to _Old Creole Days_ was like that accorded to Harte's _Luck of Roaring Camp_. It took its place at once as a classic, and the verdict has never been questioned. There is about the book, and the two books which quickly followed it, an exotic quality, an _aura_ of strangeness, that is like nothing else in our literature. They seem not American at all; surely such a background and such an atmosphere as that never could have existed "within the bounds of our stalwart republic." They are romance, one feels; pure creations of fancy, prolongations of the Longfellowism of the mid century--and yet, as one reads on and on, the conviction grows that they are not romance; they are really true. Surely "Posson Jone" and "Madame Delphine" are not creations of fancy. The elided and softly lisping dialect, broken-down French rather than debased English, is not an invention of the author's: it carries conviction the more one studies it; it is not brought in to show: it adds at every point to the reality of the work. And the carefully worked-in backgrounds--let Lafcadio Hearn speak, who settled in the city a few months after "Jean-ah Poquelin" came out in _Scribner's Monthly_: