After his return from South Africa he joined the staff of the _Spectator_, reviewing and writing essays for it and doing a certain amount of editorial work. At least, I deduce the latter fact from the statement of one who had the best means of knowing. If you look up “The Brain of the Nation,” by Charles L. Graves, who was then assistant editor of the _Spectator_, you will find among the witty and humorous poems in that volume a complete biography of John Buchan in neat and lively verse, telling how he came up to town from Oxford, settled down to the law, went to Africa, returned and became a familiar figure in the _Spectator’s_ old offices in Wellington Street: “Ev’ry Tuesday morn careering Up the stairs with flying feet, You’d burst in upon us, cheering Wellington’s funereal street.... Pundit, publicist and jurist; Statistician and divine; Mystic, mountaineer, and purist In the high financial line; Prince of journalistic sprinters-- Swiftest that I ever knew-- Never did you keep the printers Longer than an hour or two. Then, too, when the final stages Of our weekly task drew nigh, You would come and pass the pages With a magisterial eye, Seldom pausing, save to smoke a Cigarette at half past one, When you quaffed a cup of Mocha And devoured a penny bun.” The War turned those activities into other channels, and after being rejected by the army as beyond the age limit, he worked strenuously in Kitchener’s recruiting campaign, then served as Lieutenant-Colonel on the British Headquarters Staff in France, and subsequently as Director of Information. The novels he wrote in those years, “The Power House,” “The Thirty-nine Steps,” “Greenmantle,” and “Mr. Standfast,” were written as a relief from heavier duties. They are stories of mystery and intrigue as able and exciting as any of their kind. “Greenmantle,” he says in a preface, was “scribbled in every kind of odd place and moment--in England and abroad, during long journeys, in half hours between graver tasks.” He was present throughout the heroic fighting on the Somme, and his official positions at the front and at home gave him exceptional opportunities of seeing things for himself and obtaining first-hand information for his masterly “History of the War,” which will give him rank as a historian beside Kinglake and Napier. With “The Path of the King,” and more so with “Huntingtower,” he is back in his native air of romance, and one hopes he will leave the story of plot and sensation to other artists and stay there.