The strangeness of the book grows upon one as one reads. It is a book of lurid pictures--the torture and death of Bras Coupé, the murder of the _négresse_ Clemence, which in sheer horror and brutal, unsparing realism surpasses anything in _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, anything indeed in the Russian realists. It is a book too with a monotone of fear: the nameless dread that comes of holding down a race by force, or as Joel C. Harris has phrased it, "that vague and mysterious danger that seemed to be forever lurking on the outskirts of slavery, ready to sound a shrill and ghostly signal in the impenetrable swamps and steal forth under the midnight stars to murder and rapine and pillage"; the superstitious thrill when at dead of night throbs up from a neighboring slave yard "the monotonous chant and machine-like time-beat of the African dance"; the horror of finding morning after morning on one's pillow voodoo warnings and ghastly death charms placed seemingly by supernatural hands. No one has ever surpassed Cable in making felt this uncanny side of the negro. His characterization of the voodoo quadroon woman Palmyre with her high Latin, Jaloff-African ancestry, her "barbaric and magnetic beauty that startled the beholder like the unexpected drawing out of a jeweled sword," her physical perfection--lithe of body as a tigress and as cruel, witching and alluring, yet a thing of horror, "a creature that one would want to find chained"--it fingers at one's heart and makes one fear. And with all this strangeness, this flash after flash of vivid characterization, a style to match. "Victor Hugo," one exclaims often as one reads. Let us quote, say from chapter five. The stars are Cable's: There Georges De Grapion settled, with the laudable determination to make a fresh start against the mortifyingly numerous Grandissimes. "My father's policy was every way bad," he said to his spouse; "it is useless, and probably wrong, this trying to thin them out by duels; we will try another plan. Thank you," he added, as she handed his coat back to him, with the shoulder-straps cut off. In pursuance of the new plan, Madame De Grapion--the precious little heroine!--before the myrtles offered another crop of berries, bore him a boy not much smaller (saith tradition) than herself. Only one thing qualified the father's elation. On that very day Numa Grandissime (Brahmin-Mandarin de Grandissime), a mere child, received from Governor De Vaudreuil a cadetship. "Never mind, Messieurs Grandissime, go on with your tricks; we shall see! Ha! we shall see!" "We shall see what?" asked a remote relative of that family. "Will Monsieur be so good as to explain himself?" * * * * * Bang! Bang! Alas, Madame De Grapion! It may be recorded that no affair of honor in Louisiana ever left a braver little widow.