Mr. Cable, of course, more than all the rest of the people who have written of New Orleans put together, placed the city definitely in literature.  And it is interesting, if somewhat saddening, to recall that for lifting the city into the world of belles lettres, for adorning it and preserving it in such volumes as “Old Creole Days,” “The Grandissimes,” “Madame Delphine,” and other valuable, truthful, and charming works, he was roundly abused by his own fellow-townsmen.  Far from attacking Mr. Cable, New Orleans ought to build him a monument, and I am glad to say that, though the monument is not there yet, the city does seem to have come to its senses, and that the prophet is no longer without honor in his own country.

Some further leaves are added to the literary laurels of the city by what Thomas Bailey Aldrich has written of it, and the wreath is made the greater by the fact that in New Orleans was born “the only literary man in New York,” Professor Brander Matthews.

Another distinguished name in letters, connected with the place, is that of Lafcadio Hearn, who was at one time a reporter on a New Orleans newspaper, and who not only wrote about the French quarter, but collected many proverbs of the Creoles in a book which he called “Gombo Zebes.”  In his little volume, “Chita,” Hearn described the land of lakes, bayous, and chenieres, which forms a strip between the city and the Gulf, and which, with its wild birds, wild scenery, and wild storms, and its extraordinary population of hunters and fishermen—­Cajuns, Italians, Japanese, Spanish, Kanakas, Filipinos, French, and half-breed Indians, all intermarrying—­is the strangest, most outlandish section of this country I have ever visited.  The Filipinos, who introduced shrimp fishing in this region, building villages on stilts, like those of their own islands, were not there when Hearn wrote “Chita,” nor was Ludwig raising diamond-back terrapin on Grand Isle, but the live-oaks, draped with sad Spanish moss, lined the bayous as they do to-day, and the alligators, turtles and snakes were there, and the tall marsh grass, so like bamboo, fringed the banks as it does now, and water hyacinth carpeted the pools, and the savage tropical storms came sweeping in, now and then, from the Gulf, flooding the entire country, tearing everything up by the roots, then receding, carrying the floating debris back with them to the salt sea.  One has to see what they call a “slight” storm, in that country, to know what a great storm there must be.  Hearn surely saw storms there, for in “Chita” he describes with terrifying vividness that historic tempest which, in 1856, obliterated, at one stroke, Last Island, with its fashionable hotel and all the guests of that hotel.  I have seen a “little” thunderstorm in Barataria Bay and I do not want to see a big one.  I have seen brown men who, in the storm of 1915 (which did a million dollars’ worth of damage in New Orleans), floated about the Baratarias for days, upon the roofs of houses,