Strange True Stories of Louisiana. By George W. Cable. (Kagan
Paul, Trench, Trlibner, and Co.)—Mr. Cable has been at great pains to collect these "true stories," and to examine the evidence for their authenticity, evidence which he sets out in some detail in his introduction, under the heading of " How I Got Them." There are seven of them, and they are curiously varied in subject. The first is a melancholy tale of adventure among Indians. The second is as sprightly and pleasant as the first is sad. Two girls make a journey across Louisiana with their father and a party of travellers. Nothing could be more naif and charming than the story of their experiences. Very rough travel it was; but they found time, it would seem, to get plenty of fun out of it. A remarkable thread of romance mingles with the plot of this narrative. One of their fellow-travellers is a certain very delicate-looking lady, wife of a carpenter, but once the widow of a guillotined noble. She furnishes the damsels with splendours that remained to her from her old life, and she tells her story. Slavery stories, of course, form an important part of the book. In one we have the narrative of a famous trial, in which the freedom of one Salome Muller was at stake. It is as curious a narrative as one could easily find in legal annals. A more tragic tale is that of " The Haunted House in Royal Street." Madame Lalaurie, the principal personage, was one of those miscreants—not uncommon, alas !—who disprove the comfortable theory that no one will willingly injure his own property. Brutal drivers do it every day in England ; and a human chattel excites a worse cruelty than does the brute. Those who have argued that the cruelties described in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" are, for this reason, impossible, must have been either insincere, or strangely ignorant of human nature, not to speak of history. The last chapter of this story is not the least curious, describing how all girls who could not show pure white or Indian blood, were turned out of the school which had been established in Madame Lalaurie's old house. That qualification, "or Indian," is very curious. The other two " true stories " are "Attalie Brouillard " and " The War Diary of a Union Woman in the South," both worth reading.
Previous page
