It is magnificent, yet it is "lumber." It is introduced apparently to furnish background for the death of the "Cajun," but the "Cajun" is only an incidental figure in the book. To deserve such "limelight" he should have been the central character who had been hunted with increasing interest up to the end and his crime and his punishment should have been the central theme. With _Madame Delphine_ (1881) had closed the first and the great period in Cable's literary career. The second period was a period of miscellany: journalized articles on the history and the characteristics of the Creoles, on New Orleans and its life, on Louisiana, its history and traditions, on phases of social reform. Necessary as this work may have been, one feels inclined to deplore it. When one has discovered new provinces in the realm of gold one does not well, it would seem, to lay aside his magic flute and prepare guide books to the region. The New England atmosphere brought to life a native area in Cable. His mother had been of New England ancestry. Moral wrestlings, questions of reform, problems of conscience, were a part of his birthright. One feels it even in his earliest work: he had seen, we feel, the problem of _The Grandissimes_ before he had found the story. After his removal to Northampton, Massachusetts, it may be said that reform work became his real profession. Not that we criticize his choice, for life ever is greater than mere art; we record it simply because it explains. He formed home culture clubs for the education and the esthetic culture of wage-earners, and conducted a magazine in the interest of the work; he interested himself actively in the cause of the negro; so actively, indeed, that after his _Silent South_ and _The Negro Question_ and the problem novel _John March, Southerner_, the South practically disowned him. His third period begins, perhaps, with his novel _Strong Hearts_ in 1899. The pen that so long had been dipped in controversy and journalism and philanthropic propaganda again essayed fiction, but it was too late. The old witchery was gone. His later novels, all his fiction indeed after _Madame Delphine_, with the exception perhaps of parts of _Bonaventure_, read as if written by a disciple of the earlier Cable. The verve, the sly humor, the Gallic finesse, the Creole strangeness and charm, have disappeared. There is a tightening in the throat as one reads the last page of _Madame Delphine_, there is a flutter of the heart as one reads the love story of Honoré and Aurora, but nothing grips one as he reads _The Cavalier_. A pretty little story, undoubtedly, but is it possible that the author of it once wrote "Posson Jone" and "Jean-ah Poquelin"? And _Gideon's Band_, a romance with an attempt to win back the old witchery of style--it was all in vain. Why say more?