CABLE, GEORGE WASHINGTON Ameri can author, was born in New Orleans, La., on Oct. 12, 1844. The son of a Virginia father and a New England mother, he became a clerk at 15, fought two years for the Confederacy as a cavalry man, engaged in surveying and newspaper work, and then entered the counting-room of a cotton house. But all this time he was absorbing the charm of the Crescent City. Like his contemporary, Lafcadio Hearn, he pored over yellowed records, wandered in the old French quarter, studied alike the great creole families and the picturesque types of the levee. His tales, based on this life, ap peared first in Scribner's Monthly; then, in 1879, were collected in book form under the title, Old Creole Days. With the possible exception of Madame Delphine (1881), Cable's art reached its highest point in this first volume. The delicacy of his portrayal of the exotic background of the Southland, the deftness of his dia logue, the bewitching grace and dignified gallantry of his charac ters all rank the tales high in the local colour movement of the later 19th century. Strange True Stories of Louisiana (1889) also partakes of this charm, which in the best of his novels The Gran dissimes (188o) is darkened and deepened by the shadow of slav ery. Old feuds between haughty clans dating back to the early days of settlement, shifting glimpses of voodoo rites and carnival balls, of thick canebrakes and the French market, of feverish gambling and busy commerce, a gallery of characters, make the book almost an epitome of Louisiana history. But as a romancer Cable fails somewhat in constructive power, this fault being even more prominent in two of his other early and somewhat distin guished novels, Dr. Sevier (1885), a study of the Civil War period, and Bonaventure (1888), a pastoral chronicle of outlying Loui siana and the "Cajun" descendants of the refugees from Grand Pre. Although Cable continued writing until his death in St. Petersburg, Fla., on Jan. 31, 1925, his later fiction is distinctly inferior to his first books; and his studies belonging more specifi cally to the field of social history such as The Creoles of Louisiana (1884) and The Negro Question (189o) are not outstanding. Af ter 1885 Cable made his home in Northampton, Mass., occupying himself with home culture clubs and with giving many readings from his works. It is not, however, as teacher or reformer, but as chronicler of the Crescent City, of the sluggish bayous and sunlit meadows of the lower Mississippi, and as portrayer of the de scendants of the early French and Spanish inhabitants that his reputation is secure.