We mention these facts to show that there was once good ground for the author's ambition to be an artist. Yet at the age of eighteen, just when one would expect such a talent to exert itself irresistibly, young Wallace enlisted to fight against Mexico. He was made a second lieutenant and ordered to guard the stores at the mouth of the Rio Grande. In Mexico he found the material for "The Fair God," his first novel, on which he worked occasionally for twenty years. At the end of the Mexican war he returned to Indiana to study law, in which respect, it will be noticed, he followed in the footsteps of his father. Three years after his admission to the bar he married Susan Elston, of Crawfordsville, herself of no mean literary gifts, as her three collections of charming sketches, "The Land of the Pueblos," "The Storied Sea," and "The Repose in Egypt," attest. The Wallaces lived in Crawfordsville until the outbreak of the War of the Rebellion. Thereupon the young lawyer went straight to Indianapolis and offered his services to the governor. For a while he served as adjutant-general. Then he took the colonelcy of a regiment of zouaves, and with such vigor and success that early in September, 1861, he was brevetted brigadier-general. For gallantry at Fort Donelson he was afterwards brevetted major-general. At the close of the war he was one of the most distinguished soldiers in the land. As a recognition of his great services--in July, 1864, according to Secretary Stanton and General Grant, he had saved Washington from destruction--he was appointed to the commission which tried the assassins of Lincoln. That duty done, he returned to Crawfordsville. This return home signalized the real beginning of his literary career. He was now not far from forty years of age, and he was not content to live on his military reputation. Law had little power over him. So he turned to the manuscript which had been growing slowly for many years; and 1873 saw the publication of "The Fair God," the souvenir of the author's service in the Mexican war. Compared with the average romance, "The Fair God" possesses exceptional power and originality. "Ben-Hur" appeared in 1880; but it must not be supposed that General Wallace gave this second book his exclusive attention for the seven years that had passed. It was half written when, in 1878, President Hayes appointed the distinguished Indianian Governor of New Mexico. The visitor at the Wallace homestead in Crawfordsville will be shown the beech tree in the shade of which the work was done. To the way in which he works we shall turn later. The concluding half of the tale was written at spare moments in the governor's palace in Santa Fé, which Mrs. Wallace has described as "the last rallying-place of the Pueblo Indians."