Cable as a short story writer, a maker of miniatures with marvelous skill of touch, was most successful perhaps with dainty femininities of the old régime. Once, twice, thrice the light of romance glowed upon his page. Then he became a reformer, a journalist, a man with a problem. But he who gave to American literature _Madame Delphine_ and _Old Creole Days_ need not fear the verdict of coming days. Already have these works become classics. II The old Spanish régime in America furnished the theme of Lewis Wallace's (1827-1905) first romance, _The Fair God_, published the year "'Sieur George" appeared in _Scribner's_. He had returned from the Mexican War interested in Aztec antiquities. After the Civil War, in which he took a prominent part, he began in the intervals of his law practice to write a military romance centering about Cortez and the conquest, and in 1873, through the efforts of Whitelaw Reid, succeeded in having it published in Boston. It was not, however, until 1884, after the enormous popularity of _Ben Hur_, that it was discovered by the reading public. It is really better in workmanship and proportions than its more highly colored and vastly more exploited companion; it moves strongly, its battle scenes have a resonance and excitement about them that make them comparable even with Scott's, but its tendency is to sentiment and melodrama: it is a blending of Prescott and Bulwer-Lytton. A far more distinctive study of old Spanish days is to be found in Helen Hunt Jackson's _Ramona_, undoubtedly the strongest romance of the period. Mrs. Jackson was a daughter of Professor Nathan W. Fiske of Amherst, Massachusetts, and until the last decade of her life was a resident of her native New England. Not until she was thirty-five and had been bereft of husband and children did she attempt literature. Her first form of expression was poetry, the short, sharp cry of desolation, narrowly personal and feminine. Then she wrote travel sketches and juveniles and moral essays, and then an outpouring of fiction intense and sentimental. During the seventies and the early eighties her work was in all the magazines. So versatile and abundant was she that at one time Dr. Holland seriously contemplated an issue of _Scribner's_ made up wholly of her contributions.