Of Mrs. Catherwood's romances the best is _The Lady of Fort St. John_, made so perhaps on account of the unique character Rossignol. Her strongest work, however, lies in her shorter stories. It was a peculiarity of the whole period that nearly all of its writers of fiction should have been restricted in their powers of creation to the small effort rather than to the large. It was the age of cameos rather than canvases. Her volume, _The Chase of St. Castin and Other Stories of the French in the New World_, and her _Mackinac and Lake Stories_, which deal with the mixed populations dwelling on the islands of the Great Lakes, show her at her highest level. Her versatility, however, was remarkable. Her _Spirit of an Illinois Town_, a realistic story of a typical boom town, has in it the very soul of the new West, and her _The Days of Jeanne d'Arc_, written after much observation of the Vosges and Lorraine peasants in France and a year of work in the best libraries, is as brilliant a piece of historical work as was produced during the period. Whatever her failings as a romancer she must be reckoned with always as perhaps the earliest American pioneer of that later school of historical fiction writers that so flourished in the nineties. After her stirring tales had appeared, _Alice of Old Vincennes_, and _Monsieur Beaucaire_, and _The Seats of the Mighty_, and all the others, were foregone conclusions. IV The latest field in America for romance was that created by the Civil War. The patriarchal life of the great Southern plantations had in it a peculiar picturesqueness, especially when viewed through the fading smoke of the conflict that destroyed it. An old aristocracy had been overthrown by Northern invaders--field enough for romance. It had been a peculiar aristocracy--a "democratic aristocracy," as it was fond of explaining itself, "not of blood but of influence and of influence exerted among equals,"[119] but none the less it was an aristocracy in the heart of democratic America, Roman in its patrician pride, its jealously guarded principle of caste, its lavish wealth, and its slavery centered, social régime. Like all aristocracies it was small in numbers. "Only about 10,781 families held as many as fifty or more slaves in 1860, and these may, without great error, be taken as representing the number of the larger productive estates of the South."[120] But of these estates very many were only commercial establishments with little social significance. The real aristocracy was to be found in a few old families, notably in Virginia, in numbers not exceeding the New England aristocracy of the Brahmins, which had been set apart by a principle so radically different. Both were narrowly provincial rather than national, both were centered within themselves, both were intolerant and self-satisfied, and both alike disappeared in the flames of the war to make way for the new national spirit which was to rule the new age.