_Rei Negro_ (The Black King) belongs to the maturity of the writer’s career, having appeared in 1914. It is told in straightforward, uninterrupted manner, without an entangling opulence of words or a dazzling series of irrelevant descriptions. Equally at home in the desert sertão, the glitter of life in the capital, or the _fazenda_ that is a link between the two, the author in this novel, presents as background the lively, multifarious life upon a large plantation, and as persons, the proprietors above and the virtual serfs below. The bare plot is simplicity itself; a favourite slave, Macambira, marries one of the black belles of the _fazenda_; the son of the proprietor, indulged since his birth and sensuous with the double unrestraint of climate and assumed racial prerogatives, attacks and overcomes the prospective bride. Fright seals the woman’s lips, but when, after her happy marriage, the child is born white, the truth must come out. The proprietor’s efforts to hide his son’s misdeed--for the child is born during a prolonged absence of the woman’s husband--prove abortive and Macambira wreaks vengeance by slaying his wife’s assailant. The wife has died in the agony of her knowledge and the birth; the husband, once his revenge is accomplished, disappears beyond the mountains. This is no common slave, however; Macambira, from the lips of the old Balbina, hears thrilling accounts of his regal provenience. Here he is but a humble black; among his own tribe, yonder in the African wilds, he is a king, a black king. His wrongs are more than matters of individual care; his slaying of Julinho is more than a personal vengeance. It is the vengeance of a tribe, the assertion of a race, the proclamation of human dignity. The greater to heighten the contrast between black and white, Netto has made Macambira a chaste, Herculean figure, proof against the temptations of mind and milieu to which Julinho succumbs and is ultimately sacrificed. The environment is drawn with swift, but effective strokes; the minor characters really live; there is genuine pathos in the common situation out of which the author draws uncommon results; there is poetic beauty, as well as psychological power, to the legendary evocations of old Balbina as she whispers the tale of greatness into the black king’s ears and arouses his spirit to what to him is a mighty deed.