The year 1889 saw the publication of a work of pure romance in _My Spanish Sailor_ by (Margaret) Marshall Saunders. This was a love story of the sea in which a Nova Scotian girl and a Spanish sea-captain are the leading characters. Again in _Rose à Charlitte_ (1898), afterwards published as _Rose of Acadie_, Miss Saunders essays romance, colored, it is true, by a seemingly historic atmosphere, but yet rather a record than a history, for the Acadian habits and customs which one might think of as belonging to a past age were current among the people in the Bay of St. Mary settlement when visited by Miss Saunders in the summer of 1897. Here the descendants of the Acadians had lived apart from the English and preserved their language, traditions, customs, and their unique manner of life. ‘The elements of strength and weakness of the people, their patient devotion, their openness, simplicity and generosity, their love of gossip and light-heartedness, with the shadows of the tragic past brooding over them, are all caught in a true perspective.’ Thus it is not until the year 1896 that we come upon a truly legitimate successor to _The Golden Dog_. In that year appeared Gilbert Parker’s _Seats of the Mighty_, which became one of the most popular of his novels. The story has a strong and fairly unified and coherent plot. It exhibits Parker’s powers of characterization and presents to us a gallery of vividly limned historic portraits—Robert Moray, Doltaire, Gabord, De la Darant, Bigot, Vaudreuil, Montcalm, Wolfe—in the main true to type, human, and universal. There is not, however, an unerring accuracy in atmosphere and color and characterization. The writer was not sufficiently saturated with his subject and occasional touches of modernity and tinges of contemporary color subtract from the excellence of artistry.