melodramatically: "Don't let me get at him. I'll kill the scoundrel."

The Grants convened in their red brick home on Sixty-sixth Street. Where do we stand in the way of money? Pocketbooks emptied on the table. Total assets, eighty dollars in cash, and about one hundred dollars besides that Mrs. Grant had somewhere around the house.

The General lay in bed, in the darkness, during the long hours of the night, suffering the torture of those who learn too late. If I had only known... words which are like vials of bottled death. And as the days of his life rose before him in memory he sighed at the thought of poverty and helplessness in his old age. Even that could be endured, but how could he endure the remembrance of swindled investors, and of the name of Grant being held up to scorn or pity, which is worse

than scorn?

When the full story of Ward's duplicity had come out Grant said, in the melancholy tone of a man who has lost all confidence in human nature: "I have made it the rule of my life to trust a man long after other people gave him up; but I don't see how I can trust any human being again."

To his niece, Clara Cramer, whose aunt had lost all her savings in the failure, he wrote:

Financially the Grant family is ruined for the present, and by the most stupendous frauds ever perpetrated. But your Aunt Jennie must not fret over it. I still have a home and as long as I live she shall enjoy it as a matter of right; at least until she recovers what she has lost. Fred is young, active, honest and intelligent, and will work with a vim to recuperate his losses. Of course his first effort will be to repay his aunts.

But there was the fund of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars which had been subscribed for him on his return from his world tour. It was held by trustees who were empowered to

Fifteen thousand dollars a
Then, all of a sudden, the
It had been invested in rail-
The

pay him only the interest. year ... that was a comfort. fund ceased to bear interest. road stocks, and the railroads had fallen on evil days. trustees notified him that there was no more money to be had. Tradesmen's bills for household necessities came pouring in, and the family would not have been able to buy its daily bread if Charles Wood, of Lansingburgh, N. Y., a stranger to all the Grants, had not generously sent a check for one thousand dollars to the General. He begged that this amount be accepted as a loan "on account of my share for services ending in April, 1865." A few days later the Mexican minister at Washington, moved by Grant's long friendship for Mexico, forwarded a thousand dollars which he wanted the family to take as a gift. They finally took it as a loan. It was on these two contributions that the General and Mrs. Grant lived for some time.

Mr. Vanderbilt said nothing about his one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, but the Grants looked around to ascertain some way to give him security. The General turned over to him the Grant farm near St. Louis, his house in Philadelphia, his home on East Sixty-sixth Street-which was Mrs. Grant's property-and all his personal belongings, such as the swords and trophies that had been presented to him. Vanderbilt wanted to return these possessions, but the Grants declined to take them back. Eventually Vanderbilt gave the curios and swords to the United States government, and they are now in the museum at Washington.

84

Many of the newspapers criticized Grant for going into the firm, and others went so far as to declare that he had profited by Ward's swindling operations. Letters by the hundreds came from the depositors of the Marine National Bank and

Grant as a Witness

491

the customers of Grant & Ward; and Fish-put on trial for wrecking the bank-claimed that he had been led on by the fact that General Grant was in the business, and especially by the General's letter, which had assured him that everything was all right.

Fish was tried first, and General Grant was a witness. He was too ill to go to court, so his deposition had to be taken. He stated that he considered himself merely a special partner in the firm of Grant & Ward, and liable only for his own investment. He did not recall having written any letter to Fish, and his memory was poor on almost everything connected with the disaster. Fish was found guilty and sentenced to seven years in the penitentiary.

The expert accountants finally plowed through the labyrinth of Grant & Ward's accounts. They discovered that the firm had two distinct and different sets of books-those in the office, having been kept for show purposes, were false in every particular. The real state of things was revealed in a secret set of books kept by Ward himself.

The liabilities of the firm amounted to the enormous total of $16,792,640 . . . and its little handful of assets counted up to only $67,174 yet the official set of books showed assets

of over $27,000,000.

When Ward was brought into court his mind was vague, and he seemed to be too broken and bewildered to give a coherent account of himself. He admitted that the firm had been insolvent for two years, and he declared that he did not know what had become of the money, except that he "had lost" it.

He was convicted of grand larceny, and sent to the state penitentiary for ten years.

T

CHAPTER XXXII

THE HOUSE OF PAIN

§ 1

HE disaster had the hazy, intangible features of a dream. Grotesque shapes, their faces washed in dark

ness, moved dimly behind the sharply molded actualities. Events dissolved into the deepening shadows of an inscrutable Fate.

Had it all happened?

Yes; it had happened. Ward and Fish were in jail; and there was the office with the sad-eyed accountants trying to disentangle the records; and the bored deputy sheriffs; and the columns of scandal in the newspapers. That was all real enough . . . and there was the pile of letters on Grant's table... pathetic, tearful letters from people who had lost their savings.

The great adventure of Ulysses Grant, with its splendid years the epic of the marching men. . . the triumphs

And there was the puzzling stab of pain in his throat. At first it had been a minor discomfort. He had felt it for the first time one day when he was eating a peach; a sharp, cutting sensation at the root of his tongue. Not much attention was given to it . . . he had caught a cold, perhaps. But it continued long after a cold should have disappeared.

$ 2

In the dejected silence of the General's reflections came the remembrance of the Century Magazine's offer to purchase arti

Mark Twain Calls

493

cles by him on the Civil War. Three articles they wanted, but they said they would take more, at five hundred dollars each. Fifteen hundred dollars for the three; it would help.

The General wrote an article on the battle of Shiloh; it appears to-day in the Century war papers-a dry, informative story, in terse English, as devoid of decoration as a bale of hay. The five hundred dollars came, and he wrote on, forgetting the present, and living again in the time of the Civil War.

Samuel L. Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, delivered a lecture at Chickering Hall one night in November, 1884; and as he was leaving the building he met Richard Watson Gilder, the editor of the Century, who told him that General Grant had written some war articles for the magazine.

Mr. Clemens was a publisher himself. He was the chief owner of Charles L. Webster & Co., a concern that published Mark Twain's own books and sold them-not through bookstores, but by agents who made canvasses from house to house. He says in his Autobiography:

Gilder went on to describe how eagerly General Grant had entertained the proposition to write when it had last been put to him, and how poor he evidently was. . . .

The thing which astounded me was that, admirable man as Gilder certainly is, and with a heart which is in the right place, it had never seemed to occur to him that to offer General Grant five hundred dollars for a magazine article was not only the monumental injustice of the nineteenth century, but of all centuries. He ought to have known that if he had given General Grant a check for ten thousand dollars, the sum would still have been trivial; that if he had paid him twenty thousand dollars that would still have been inadequate.

The next day Clemens went to 3 East Sixty-sixth Street. He was already well acquainted with the Grant family, and