In the days when the bugle still mourned across the vale, Lew Wallace was a citizen of my native town of Crawfordsville. There he had amused himself in the years immediately before the civil conflict, in drilling a company of 'Algerian Zouaves' known as the Montgomery Guards, of which my father was a member, and this was the nucleus of the Eleventh Indiana Regiment which Wallace commanded in the early months of the war. It is not, however, of Wallace's military services that I wish to speak now, nor of his writings, but of the man himself as I knew him later at the capital, at a time when, in the neighborhood of the federal building at Indianapolis, any boy might satisfy his longing for heroes with a sight of many of our Hoosier Olympians. He was of medium height, erect, dark to swarthiness, with finely chiseled features and keen, black eyes, with manners the most courtly, and a voice unusually musical and haunting. His appearance, his tastes, his manner, were strikingly Oriental.
He had a strong theatric instinct, and his life was filled with drama--with melodrama, even. His curiosity led him into the study of many subjects, most of them remote from the affairs of his day. He was both dreamer and man of action; he could be 'idler than the idlest flowers,' yet he was always busy about something. He was an aristocrat and a democrat; he was wise and temperate, whimsical and injudicious in a breath. As a youth he had seen visions, and as an old man he dreamed dreams. The mysticism in him was deep-planted, and he was always a little aloof, a man apart. His capacity for detachment was like that of Sir Richard Burton, who, at a great company given in his honor, was found alone poring over a puzzling Arabic manuscript in an obscure corner of the house. Wallace, like Burton, would have reached Mecca, if chance had led him to that adventure.
Wallace dabbled in politics without ever being a politician; and I might add that he practiced law without ever being, by any high standard, a lawyer. He once spoke of the law as 'that most detestable of human occupations.' First and last he tried his hand at all the arts. He painted a little; he moulded a little in clay; he knew something of music and played the violin; he made three essays in romance. As boy and man he went soldiering; he was a civil governor, and later a minister to Turkey. In view of his sympathetic interest in Eastern life and character, nothing could have been more appropriate than his appointment to Constantinople. The Sultan Abdul Hamid, harassed and anxious, used to send for him at odd hours of the night to come and talk to him, and offered him on his retirement a number of positions in the Turkish government.