For by 1830 the preference of native subjects for tales, to say nothing of novels, is plainly marked. The example of Irving in this direction could not fail of followers. From their beginning the early magazines and annuals essay in fiction the legends, the history, and even the local manners of the United States, in circles widening with the area of the country. Thus the _Atlantic Souvenir_ for 1829, furnishing forth in its short fictions an historical romance of mediæval France, a moral tale in oriental setting, a melodrama of the Pacific Islands, and a lively farce on the revolution in Peru, presented also, with occasional attempt at native scenery, the following: _The Methodist’s Story_, a moral situation of the anger of father and son; _Narantsauk_, an historical tale of Baron Castine; _The Catholic_, weaving into King Philip’s attack on Springfield the hopeless affection of a Catholic girl and a Protestant youth--the very field of Hawthorne; and a melodramatic _Emigrant’s Daughter_. In the same year, 1829, James Hall, then fairly afloat on his vocation of law and his avocation of letters, compiled, indeed largely composed, the first _Western Souvenir_ at Vandalia, Illinois. Its most significant tales are three of his own, set, with more careful locality than most of the seaboard attempts, in the frontier life along the Mississippi. _The Indian Hater_ and _Pete Featherton_ present backwoodsmen of Illinois and Ohio. _The French Village_ is definitely a _genre_ study. Loose enough in plot, it has in detail a delicacy and local truth not unworthy the material of Cable. That there was a definite tendency toward native themes is amply confirmed by the annuals of subsequent years before 1835. Besides Hawthorne’s earlier pieces in the _Token_, there had appeared by 1831 studies of the Natchez and of the Minnesota Indians, the Maryland Romanists, Shays’s Rebellion, the North-River Dutch, and the Quakers. And the same tendency appears in the early magazines. _The Western Monthly Review_, adventurously put forth by Timothy Flint in Cincinnati, had among its few tales before 1831 an Irish-Shawnee farce on the Big Miami, _The Hermit of the Prairies_, a romance of French Louisiana, a rather forcible study of Simon Girty and the attack on Bryant’s Station, and two local character sketches entitled _Mike Shuck_ and _Colonel Plug_. To extend the period of consideration is to record the strengthening of the tendency established by Irving and Cooper. The books of John Pendleton Kennedy are collections of local sketches. Mrs. Hale, praised for her fidelity to local truth, was supported in the same ambition by Mrs. Gilman. Mrs. Kirkland’s sketches of early Michigan are as convincing as they are vivacious. Most of these studies emerge, if that can be said to emerge which is occasionally fished up by the antiquary, only by force of what we have been berated for lacking--local inspiration.