But Parker’s fiction really began with his short stories of ‘Pretty Pierre’ in 1890. It is related that upon coming to London from Australia he brought to Archibald Forbes, then noted as a war correspondent, a collection of stories. Forbes’ comment was: ‘You have the best collection of titles I ever saw.’ Parker took his manuscripts home and promptly burned them. A day or so afterwards, while passing a shop window filled with armor and other curios, he noticed the leather coat and fur cap of a trapper. He went at once to his room and began to write _The Patrol of the Cypress Hills_, the first story in the series _Pierre and His People_. These stories dealt with the life of early Western Canada and were followed from time to time by other volumes: _A Romany of the Snows_, published in England under the title, _An Adventurer of the North_, picturing French-Canadians in the woods and rural settlements; _The Lane That Had No Turning_, stories of that Quebec settlement which is the background of the novel _When Valmond Came to Pontiac_; _Cumner’s Son_, sketches of life in the South Seas and in Australia; _Donovan Pasha_, tales of Egypt and the Soudan; _Northern Lights_, more modern stories of Western Canada. Parker became a prolific writer of novels and his settings range from Canada and the South Seas to England, Egypt, and South Africa. The treatment varies from an almost immediate transcript of near present conditions as in _The Judgment House_ to the re-creation of the historic past in _The Battle of the Strong_, from the delicate imaginative romance in _When Valmond Came to Pontiac_, to a pathological study in _The Right of Way_; he gives us a combination of melodrama and mysticism in _The Weavers_, the revealment of innate greatness of character in _The Translation of a Savage_, while in _You Never Know Your Luck_, he cleverly expands a tenuous short story thread to the full proportions of a novel.