When General Wallace returned to Crawfordsville at the close of the war he was thirty-eight; he had served creditably in one war and with enviable distinction in a second, and he turned to the arts of peace from a military experience that had given him wide reputation and acquaintance among public men of the Civil War period. He began industriously to reëstablish himself in his law practice, and varied his occupation with study and literary work. “The Man at Arms,” his youthful attempt at “A Tale of the Tenth Century,” had disappeared during his absence in Mexico; but the ambition to write a romance of the invasion of Cortez, and his manuscript beginnings of it, had survived two wars, and he now set about finishing the story. He had at this time no definite ambition to become an author, and he gave his evenings to the writing of “The Fair God” with little idea of ever publishing it. After its completion he carried it East with him on a business journey. Whitelaw Reid gave him an introduction to a Boston publisher, and the result was the appearance of the tale in 1873. He had spent in all about twelve years on the book, part having been written, as already stated, in his boyhood; and the author’s faithfulness to his early purpose through many years that had brought new duties and obligations is in keeping with his whole character. The scenes of “The Fair God” were unfamiliar to the novel reader, and the very names in the book were somewhat disconcerting; but the tale was received in the beginning with a fair degree of interest, and it has ever since enjoyed a steady sale. The subsequent success of “Ben Hur” directed attention anew to General Wallace’s earlier tale, but the romance was something more than an amateur effort, and time has not diminished its entertaining qualities. As a picture of Aztecan civilization it is accurate, and the incidents are related in an orderly and natural manner that holds the attention. The devotion of the people to their religion is impressive; but the tale is essentially a military romance. The battle scenes following the appearance of Cortez and his Spaniards are described with an animation and an amplitude that impart to the reader the sense of beholding a series of great spectacles. The book is rich in those surprises which it is the business of the romancer to produce; and the chapters descriptive of the battle towers (_mantas_) which were among the European’s resources, and of the retreat of the invaders, are noisy with the clang of battle. The prophecies of the mystic priest Mualox, who sees through the eyes of a child the coming of the Spaniards, are interesting; and curiously enough they had their origin in an incident of General Wallace’s own experience in Indiana, showing how the imagination may play upon the commonplace. When he lived at Covington, he formed the acquaintance of a tailor who was deeply interested in the occult sciences, and who