_Hearn._ To Lafcadio Hearn the southern novel was “gushy-floriated English--written in bad taste, wishy-washy trash.” With his sympathy for the underdog, strengthened by his connection with the quadroon Althea Foley, he admired Cable’s defense of the Negro. Nevertheless, Hearn did not censure the South openly. He held stock beliefs such as that the Negro would disappear in freedom--“dependent like the ivy, he needs some strong oak-like friend to cling to”--and that it was only the mulatto influence that made slaves unmanageable. Always attracted by the unusual and picturesque, Hearn became an authority on Louisiana lore, making friends with the _bonnes vielles negresses_, who sold homemade sweetmeats in New Orleans, and the mysterious Voodoo Queen, Marie Laveau. But the teeming levees come to life only in sketches like “Dolly, an Idyl of the Levee” and “Banjo Jim’s Story” (1876). In the West Indies Hearn was struck by the “appetizing golden bodies of the Martinique Quadroons, sensuous but childlike,” gossiped with the washerwomen and treasured their soft slurring talk; and watched the _porteuses_ on their way to market in the early morning, huge baskets of fruit and vegetables balanced on their heads, their skirts tucked into a belt in front, showing the shapely muscled bronze of their legs, as they walked with all the lithe feline grace of some wild animal. _Youma_, “La Giablesse” and “Un Ravenant” are good fiction of the West Indies, but the wealth of Hearn’s sensitive observation appears in his travel reporting. He was better in describing settings than in presenting character. _Howells._ The serious phase of Negro life that William Dean Howells thought worthy of inclusion in his canvas of the American scene was the age-worn tragedy of the octoroon. In _An Imperative Duty_ (1892), Rhoda, the beautiful daughter of a northern physician and an accomplished octoroon, bore no evidence of Negro blood. On the eve of her marriage, she is told her lineage by her duty-bound aunt. Later, passing for an Italian and happily married to a man who is undisturbed by her lineage, she is still wretched at her “disgrace.” The novel is sympathetic, but there were graver, less romantic problems of Negro life that a novelist of Howells’ scope and ability might have presented.