My father used to tell me that when he was a boy there was an old man living on the farm, nominally as a hired hand, but actually as a pensioner, since he was beyond the age of useful labor. My father said the children considered him not quite right in his mind, but very entertaining, for he often repeated long, disjointed narratives of an impossible world and an impossible society which they found as fascinating as the Oz books. On looking back, he said, Old Hodge talked like an educated man, but this might simply be the impression of young, uncultivated minds. Clearly it was in some attempt to give form and unity to his tales that the old man wrote his fable down, and then was too shy to submit it for publication. This is the only reasonable way to account for its existence. Of course he says he wrote it in 1877, when he was far from old, and disconcertingly, analysis of the paper shows it might have been written then. Two other items should be noted. In the box of Backmaker’s belongings there was a watch of unknown manufacture and unique design. Housed in a cheap nickel case, the jeweled movement is of extraordinary precision and delicacy. The face has two dials, independently set and wound. The second is a quotation. It can be matched by similar quotations in any of half a hundred volumes on the Civil War. I pick this only because it is handy. From W. E. Woodward’s _Years of Madness_, p. 202: “ ... Union troops that night and next morning took a position on Cemetery Hill and Round Top.... The Confederates could have occupied this position but they failed to do so. It was an error with momentous consequences.” About Ward Moore On the battlefield at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, there is a small hill called Little Round Top. One morning in July, 1863, the Confederate Army made the tactical error of not occupying this hill. It was a mistake that cost them victory in a battle which—in the view of many historians—was the turning point of the Civil War. In the ninety years since Gettysburg one question has never been far from the minds of most Southerners—and a good many Yankees, too: What if the battle had gone the other way, what if the South had won the war? Ward Moore—a Northerner himself—has settled the matter at last in a book that might be called imaginative historical fiction, an excursion into the world of might-have-been so filled with exact and convincing detail that, for a few hours, it seems true. * * * * *