That he saw with open sympathetic eyes and a loving heart, he who runs may read in any chance page that a casual opening of his books will reveal. That the people whom he has so affectionately depicted have not loved him in return, is perhaps only a corroboration of his own words when he wrote, in his charming tale 'Belles Demoiselles Plantation,' "The Creoles never forgive a public mention." That they are tender of heart, sympathetic, and generous in their own social and domestic relations, Mr. Cable's readers cannot fail to know. But the caste line has ever been a dangerous boundary--a live wire charged with a deadly if invisible fluid--and he is a brave man who dares lay his hand upon it. More than this, the old-time Creole was an aristocrat who chose to live behind a battened door, as does his descendant to-day. His privacy, so long undisturbed, has come to be his prerogative. Witness this spirit in the protest of the inimitable Jean-ah Poquelin--the hero giving his name to one of the most dramatic stories ever penned--when he presents himself before the American governor of Louisiana to declare that he will not have his privacy invaded by a proposed street to pass his door:--"I want you tell Monsieur le President, _strit--can't--pass--at--me--'ouse_." The Creoles of Mr. Cable's generation are as jealous of their retirement as was the brave old man Poquelin; and to have it invaded by a young American who not only threw their pictures upon his canvas, but standing behind it, reproduced their eccentricities of speech for applauding Northern audiences, was a crime unforgivable in their moral code. Added to this, Mr. Cable stands accused of giving the impression that the Louisiana Creole is a person of African taint; but are there not many refutations of this charge in the internal evidence of his work? As for instance where in 'The Grandissimes' he writes, "His whole appearance was a dazzling contradiction of the notion that a Creole is a person of mixed blood"; and again when he alludes to "the slave dialect," is the implication not unequivocal that this differed from the speech of the drawing-room? It is true that he found many of his studies in the Quadroon population, who spoke a patois that was partly French; but such was the "slave dialect" of the man of color who came into his English through a French strain, or perhaps only through a generation of close French environment.