GEORGE W. CABLE. COUNT it a pleasure long to be remembered that I have been in the Cable home at Northampton, held its pretty children on my knees, knelt with the family at morning and evening prayers, and joined in their earnest and upright life. The gifted author, with his frank, genial manner, his well balanced and active mind, his poetic and refined nature, is not the only force or attraction in that lovely home. An appreciative, helpful, lovable woman, with six pretty children, make a happy centre of culture and success. Louise, the eldest, named for the mother, is an artist by nature, and will sometime, perhaps, illustrate her father's books. Mary, Lucy, Margaret, and Isabel come next, the latter just at the winsome age when you fondle her as a rest from your labor, and look down into a heart and face all untaught of the world, seeing your own innocent childhood mirrored there. Willie, the only boy, the baby, is the pet and joy of the house, coming into it to take the place of little George, who died at the age of four, of yellow fever, in the New Or leans home. To take the place of, did I say? Oh, no! for one affection never takes the place of another, for all pure love is immortal. We are never the same after it has once blossomed in the heart. It may be transplanted to other gardens, but it has forever its own individual color and fragrance. The Cable home is on Paradise Road, fitly named, a two-story-and-a-half red-brick building half covered with vines, looking toward Mount Tom and Mount Holyoke. A sunrise above the mountains, especially if they are covered with snow, is such a gorgeous picture of color and restful beauty that it never fades out of memory. So enticing are these delights of nature about the Cable home that the author confesses that they distract him, and he often works with drawn curtains. He is an ardent lover of trees, flowers, birds, and music. He sings beautifully, plays on the guitar, and has set the songs of several birds to music, for these are ever his friends he has studied ornithology as carefully as he has botany, as all know who have read his books. Nature has unlocked her secrets to him, and human nature as well. While Mr. Cable describes with a vividness of language and richness of color unsurpassed, he also understands to a rare degree the workings of the human heart. Probably no one would ever assert that his novels are written without a high moral purpose. He did not need to write the "Silent South" to show that, though the son and grandson of a slaveholder, his just and noble spirit accorded equal civil rights to black and white, and asked for the colored people the best educational advantages that they might have an equal chance in the world. He did not need to write that remarkable novel "Dr. Sevier," which, if he had done nothing else, would have made him famous, to show how his heart warmed to the poor who walk the streets of a great city, searching day after day for work, like John Richling, perhaps all unfitted and untrained for life. If he had not known some heroic woman who had cheered her husband through sorrow and disappointment, he could not have drawn that beautiful character, Mary Richling; the whole one of the most touching and sublime pictures of pure conjugal affection which literature affords. Usually a story ends with marriage, before the misfortune or prosperity of life has come to test love. In this book we watch an affection develop in the shadow, and grow on, even when the tendrils are all broken by death. No wonder the "Critic" says: "It is a beautiful story, told with an exquisite art, of which the greatest charm is the simplicity. . . . The power with which the sufferings of absolute poverty are painted with merely the simplest statement is wonderful. . . . It is a story that deepens and |