once invited General Wallace to his shop to witness manifestations of his powers. The tailor placed his apprentice under a kind of hypnotic influence, and told General Wallace to take the boy’s hand and to follow in his own mind some route with whose details he was familiar. General Wallace obeyed, mentally reviewing a highway that led to the house of a farmer client. The boy’s lips moved, and he coherently described the road, and presently the farmhouse, just as General Wallace saw them; then he abruptly ceased to follow the leader’s train of thought. He said that it was night; that some one came out of the house with a light, walked about inspecting the barnyard, and then returned to the house. The boy had now become exhausted; the tailor revived him, and General Wallace went on to his home. A few days later, when the countryman whose farm had figured in the incident came to town, General Wallace asked him if he had been at home at the hour mentioned; he replied that he had been at home and asleep. Further questioning elicited the statement that at about the time of the experiment at the tailor shop he had been aroused by noises in the barnyard, and that, fearing some marauder was after his fowls, he had taken a light and gone out to see that all was secure. The friendly reception of “The Fair God” did not awaken any unusual interest in General Wallace as a writer. He continued at Crawfordsville the life of a lawyer of polite tastes, keenly interested in politics. “The Fair God” out of the way, he began almost immediately to cast about for some new literary employment. In about 1874 it occurred to him to write a novelette, whose principal incident should be the meeting of the Wise Men in the Desert and the birth of Christ. The brief account in the Gospels had long appealed to his imagination, and he wrote what is now the first book of “Ben Hur,” intending to offer it to some magazine for publication as a sketch, with illustrations. While the manuscript still lay in his desk, he met on a railway journey an old friend, Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, and in the course of conversation the famous sceptic touched on the subject of Christianity. General Wallace had always been indifferent in religious matters, neither denying nor affirming; but Ingersoll’s downright iconoclasm alarmed him. He determined to investigate the subject and form his own conclusions; and he began researches and studies which continued through five years. When he had concluded, he fully accepted the tenets of Christian faith, and he had amplified his sketch of the Wise Men into the novel “Ben Hur.” Continuous labor had not been possible during the writing of this tale: he had been busy with everyday affairs; politics received a share of his attention; and he became, in 1878, by appointment of President Hayes, governor of New Mexico Territory. He lived at Santa Fé for three years, and much of “Ben Hur” was written in the governor’s house there. General Wallace had never visited