Books: Mr. Cabell Goes South

THE FIRST GENTLEMAN OF AMERICA—Branch Cabell—Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50).

Author (James) Branch Cabell of Virginia spent several pleasant winters in St. Augustine, Fla., where he got interested in the character of Pedro Menendez de Aviles, who founded the town (oldest continuous white settlement in the U.S.) in 1565. Cabell read in a guidebook that the headboard of Menendez' coffin was in the City Hall.

He discovered not the headboard but the coffin itself, forgotten and dust-covered in an attic. Thereafter he so stirred up the civic pride of St. Augustinians, even addressing the local Chamber of Commerce, that in 1940 the coffin was...