His best stories are the short ones, like _Marse Chan_ and _Meh Lady_, in which life on the Virginia plantations during the war is presented. Page is a natural story-teller. He wastes no time in analyzing, describing, and explaining, but sets his simple plots into immediate motion and makes us acquainted with his characters through their actions and speech. The regal mistresses of the plantations, the lordly but kind-hearted masters, the loving, simple-minded slaves, and handsome young men and maidens are far from complex personalities. They have a primitive simplicity and ingenuousness which belong to a bygone civilization. The strongest appeal in the stories is made by the negroes, whose faith in their masters is unquestioning, and sometimes pathetic. Some old negro who had been a former slave usually tells the story, and paints his "marster," his "missus," and his "white folks," as the finest in the region. He looks back upon the bygone days as a time when "nuthin' warn too good for niggers," and is sure that if his young "marster" did not get the brush "twuz cause twuz a bob-tailed fox." In _Meh Lady_ the negro relating the tale is the true but unconscious hero. This kindly presentation of the finest traits of slave days, the idealizing of the characters, and the sympathetic portrayal of the warm affection existing between master and slave give to Page's books a strong note of romanticism. The humor is mild, quaint, and subtle, and it often lies next to tears. Page is preeminently a short-story writer. He possesses the restraint, the compression, the art, the unity of idea necessary to the production of a good short story. GEORGE W. CABLE, 1844- [Illustration: GEORGE W. CABLE] George Washington Cable is of Virginia and New England stock, but he was born in New Orleans in 1844, and called this beautiful city his home until 1884, when he moved to Connecticut. The following year he selected Northampton, Massachusetts, as a permanent residence. He was but fourteen when his father died, leaving the family in straitened circumstances. The boy thereupon left school and went to work. Four years later he entered the Confederate army. So youthful was his appearance, that a planter, catching sight of him, exclaimed, "Great heavens! Abe Lincoln told the truth. We _are_ robbing the cradle and the grave!" He served two years in the southern army, and after the war returned penniless to his native city. His efforts to find employment are described in his most realistic novel, _Dr. Sevier_. He was a surveyor, a clerk to cotton merchants, and a reporter on the New Orleans _Picayune_; but his tastes were literary, and after the publication in 1879 of a volume of short stories, _Old Creole Days_, his attention was turned wholly to literature.