for the sympathy and interest manifested in me by my friends-" he hesitated-" and by those who have not hitherto been regarded as friends."

His inherent delicacy would not let him speak of any one as his enemy at this time. He was magnanimous beyond most men; but there were those whom he could not forgive, and to whom he never alluded.

He was still gaining miraculously on the 9th of April, the twentieth anniversary of Appomattox. The date was referred to by General Badeau, but Grant only answered with a sad smile. He had no desire to celebrate it in any way. He was still troubled about the future of his family, and as he grew stronger, the desire to finish his book came back. With that done, he would consider his work on earth finished.

his breast, his eyes looking straight ahead, searching dim seas of speculation. Sometimes he drove out for a short time, tottering to his carriage. Surrounded by the street scenes and the brisk, agile, and curious pedestrians, he seemed but the wraith of his stern, self-reliant manhood. When he felt particularly well, he dictated to a stenographer, walking painfully up and down the room, till his voice failed him; after that he whispered his words into the stenographer's ear. At last he was forced to write it all with his own hand. The malignant ulcer, like a living thing, had reached out and laid hold upon the vocal cords, and silenced the voice of The Great Commander forever. But he toiled with a desperate resolution painful to witness.

About the middle of May, interested persons spread the report that the General was not writing his book himself. This was contradicted by those who saw him working day by day, and the General himself despatched a letter to his publishers wherein he stated conclusively that the book was his own and that no one else had any claim upon it.

He took pleasure in his work, for it helped him forget his pain and weariness. "It is my life,' "he said to a friend. "Every day, every hour, is a week of agony. easier when employed."

REMOVAL TO MOUNT MCGREGOR.

I am

Now that this sudden turn to strength took place, the papers took on an injured tone. Their sympathy had been wasted. The General was reported to be taking his meals with his family, and actually eating solid food once more. Every one was glad to have the illustrious patient recover, of course, but no one liked to be misled by a corps of doctors. Therefore, the attending physicians were denounced as men of little knowledge and of no discernment. The funny men fell upon them with a rush. Imaginary bulletins were printed, giving humorous details of the condition of the doctors, signed, "U. S. Grant." Comic head-lines abounded. "Grant Thinks the Doctors Will Pull As May grew old, the weather became more Through." "The Doctors Still Gain Slow- and more oppressive, and Grant began again ly." "A Bad Day for the Doctors. Gen- to fail. Then the question of removing him to eral Grant Watching Them Closely." Their the mountains came up, and it was decided to pulse was reported as "rising almost as take him out of the city at once. The press high as their bills." They were called of the nation grew serious again. It was the silent men," in derision of their sud- perceived that the physicians knew their busiden abandonment of bulletins. Great pres- ness after all. A friend (Mr. Joseph W. sure was brought to bear to get outsiders Drexel) put his cottage on Mount McGregor admitted to a trial of their hands upon the at the General's service, and it was decided patient. to accept of the offer, and June 16th was fixed upon as the day of removal. Thereafter Grant was eager to get away. He longed with ever-increasing wistfulness for the trees and the sky and the wholesome influence of nature's springtime life.

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The General remained loyal to his physicians. He believed in them, and no pressure could move him. He said to Dr. Shrady: "Never mind what people say. You are right. Don't be afraid. I am the one to be pleased, and I am satisfied. Hold the fort."

Spring opened warm and wet, and the patient was oppressed by it. His gain was fitful. There were days when he worked, and days when he did little but sit and dream, always in that strangely suggestive attitude, propped in a reclining chair, his limbs wrapped in a gray robe, his hands folded on

more joking on the part of the public. The crowd stood in silent awe to see him pass. As he entered the train, some of the officials saluted him, and he disengaged his hand from his son's arm to return the salute. Some ladies bowed to him, and he returned their salutations with instant courtesy; and so he entered the car and was whirled away up the pleasant shores of the Hudson River. Naturally he thought of West Point, which had seemed so beautiful to him when he first saw it, a country youth of seventeen, and it seemed more beautiful still, now that as a dying man of three score years and three he was looking upon it for the last time. As he passed it, he turned to his wife and smiled a sad smile, and tried to speak, but could not his voice was utterly gone.

The day after Grant's arrival at Mount McGregor was made memorable by a significant message. After returning from a walk which he seemed to enjoy, Grant grew restless and unaccountable in action. He moved to and fro in the cottage as if seeking something, and at last, by signs, he made known his wish for pencil and paper. Being furnished therewith, he sat writing busily for some time, and then handed two letters to Colonel Grant. One was addressed to Dr. Douglas; the other one bore the superscription: "Memoranda for my family.'

There was something ominous in his action, and the son tore open the letter in great anxiety. It was a message of death. "I feel that I am failing," he had written; and then passed on to certain things which he wished taken care of after his death.

The family were thrown into an agony of grief, but the General sat quietly in his chair, as if resignedly waiting the end. Fear was not in his face; only weariness and lofty patience. His work was done. He had given up the fight. His invincible will to live was withdrawn; henceforward the physicians must fight alone.

The days that followed were simply days of pain and brave endurance, as his life forces slowly ebbed away. Occasionally he hobbled out into the sunshine on the piazza, but for the most part he kept to his chair and mused in statue-like immobility on incommunicable themes.

lently upon the dying man, and then moved on. He was not annoyed as another might have been by these passing shadows. Once he wrote of them: "To pass my time pleasantly, I should like to talk with them if I could." If they bowed to him he returned their salutes; and once, when a woman passing removed her bonnet, he struggled to his feet and removed his hat in acknowledgment. His favorite seat was a willow chair which stood at the northeast corner of the veranda, and there he sat during the middle hours of each day to enjoy the sun and air; as it grew chill, he returned to his fireside. He listened as courteously to the spokesman of a troop of school children, or to a little girl presenting a bouquet, as to a delegation of leading citizens or foreign journalists.

Though he was pain-weary and foreboding death, he joked a little. Once he alluded to the doctor's close-cut hair, and said it was done in order that, if the doctor was stopped at Sing Sing, on his way to Mount McGregor, People from the surrounding country he would be properly clipped. During an came in procession past the cottage, eager examination of his throat, he wrote in exto catch a glimpse of the most renowned planation of an attempt to whisper another man of his time. The railway brought jocose remark: "I said if you want anyother swarms of curious or sympathetic thing larger in the way of a spatula-is tourists, and they stole near and gazed si- that what you call it ?—I saw a man behind

was in reality glorious. He forgave the world, but there were men, old friends and subordinate officers, whom he could not invite to his side. They had broken faith with him; duplicity was to him a most hateful thing; and, being human after all, he turned his face from them. He wished them no harm, but he could not forget their perfidious deeds.

He continued to work a little on his book, for it was conceded that it could do him no I harm and might relieve his suffering. The Fourth of July was a great anniversary for him. On that day he had won Vicksburg. He did not need to be reminded of it, but he did not refer to it himself; it was far from his wish to revive memories unpleasant to the people of the South. He was not of a nature to exult over the defeat of others.

VISITED BY GENERAL BUCKNER.

About this time General Simon Buckner paid a visit to his old classmate and conqueror. "It is a purely personal visit," he said to General Grant. "I wanted you to know that many Confederate officers sympathize with you in your sickness and trouble."

"I appreciate your calling highly," the Northern chieftain wrote in reply. "I have witnessed since my illness just what I have wished to see since the war, harmony-harmony and good will between the sections. . . . We now look forward to a perpetual peace at home and a national strength which will screen us against any foreign complication. I believe myself that the war was worth all it cost us, fearful as that was. Since it was over I have visited every state in Europe and a number in the East. I know, as I did not before, the value of our institutions."

As General Buckner passed out of the house the reporters fell upon him, eager to know what was said. "I cannot tell you, ," he said. "The visit was purely personal; and, besides," he added, with eyes dim with tears, "it was too sacred. Without General Grant's consent, I cannot speak."

After reaching New York, General Buckner received a despatch from General Grant permitting the interview to be made public. When it appeared that the interview might add to the harmony and good will between the North and the South, Grant was eager to have it sent far and wide. Throughout all his later life he had had two predominating desires: one, to put down the rebellion; and, when that was done, then his whole heart went out toward the task of reconstructing the nation. And so now, though having gone away into a mountain to die, he still desired that every word of his should make for a united and peaceful nation.

His wish was gratified. The words he wrote went to North and South as messengers of peace. Again he said, "Let us have peace." And, standing there on the high ground between earth and the things beyond the earth, his words had all the force of a command and a benediction.

In ever increasing calm and ever decreasing sensibility to pain, he drifted toward the shadowed world. His introspection increased, and the certainty of his speedy death grew very strong in his own mind. "I have admonitions that the doctors know

not of," he wrote slowly upon his tablet; "I think it doubtful that I shall last much longer than the end of the month." Despair had no place in the growing serenity of his manner. There was a lofty courage which laid hold upon great conceptions of human destiny. He subscribed to no creed,

but he had an unspeakable faith in the integrity of the universe. He had no map of the unseen land toward which he was marching, but he believed it to be a better land than this, and that light and the guidance of reason would be present there as in the world he was leaving. He did not know, but he had no fear.

His consideration and his instant courtesy never left him. His gratitude for little kindnesses was inexpressibly touching. His physicians could look upon it only with tears.

On the 22d of July he expressed a wish to be in a bed. His bones were intolerably weary of the chair in which he had spent night and day during months of ceaseless suffering. The physicians looked at each other significantly. He was transferred to his bed, and as he stretched out his tired limbs and lay full length at last, he drew a sigh of relief and smiled. He felt the delicious restfulness of the bed as he used to do when a boy after a hard day's work. That he knew it to be his deathbed is certain; but it was none the less grateful because of that it was the more grateful by reason of that.

"Does it seem good to be in bed?”

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So good. So good," he whispered in

reply.

A deep, untroubled sleep fell upon him almost at once, but the physicians read the advance of death in the labored breathing and fluttering pulse. Slowly the blood ceased to warm the body. The lower limbs grew cold as marble, and the breathing grew ever quicker and lighter. The lower cells of the lungs were closing. Life was retreating to the brain.

The family at last were all there. The loyal wife sat often by his side, where she could touch his face and press his hand. His eldest son, erect, calm, and soldierly, scarcely relaxed his painful vigil. It was a long and terrible watch, and when midnight came, it was evident that death was present in the room at last. The great soldier lay in a doze which was the lethargy of dissolution, but still responded to the agonized words of love from his wife and daughter by opening his eyes in a peculiarly clear, wide, penetrat