ace who go around enslaving
God's free people with pledges--to quit drinking instead of to quit
wanting to drink.

But Sherman and Van Vliet know everything concerning Grant; and if you
tell them how you want to use the facts, both of them will testify.
Regular army men have no concealments about each other; and yet they
make their awful statements without shade or color or malice with a
frankness and a child-like naivety, indeed, which is enchanting-and
stupefying. West Point seems to teach them that, among other priceless
things not to be got in any other college in this world. If we talked
about our guild-mates as I have heard Sherman, Grant, Van Vliet and
others talk about theirs--mates with whom they were on the best possible
terms--we could never expect them to speak to us again.

.......................

I am reminded, now, of another matter. The day of the funeral I sat an
hour over a single drink and several cigars with Van Vliet and Sherman
and Senator Sherman; and among other things Gen. Sherman said, with
impatient scorn:

"The idea of all this nonsense about Grant not being able to stand rude
language and indelicate stories! Why Grant was full of humor, and full
of the appreciation of it. I have sat with him by the hour listening to
Jim Nye's yarns, and I reckon you know the style of Jim Nye's histories,
Clemens. It makes me sick--that newspaper nonsense. Grant was no
namby-pamby fool, he was a man--all over--rounded and complete."

I wish I had thought of it! I would have said to General Grant: "Put
the drunkenness in the Memoirs--and the repentance and reform. Trust the
people."

But I will wager there is not a hint in the book. He was sore, there. As
much of the book as I have read gives no hint, as far as I recollect.

The sick-room brought out the points of Gen. Grant's character--some of
them particularly, to wit:

His patience; his indestructible equability of temper; his exceeding
gentleness, kindness, forbearance, lovingness, charity; his loyalty:
to friends, to convictions, to promises, half-promises, infinitesimal
fractions and shadows of promises; (There was a requirement of him which
I considered an atrocity, an injustice, an outrage; I wanted to implore
him to repudiate it; Fred Grant said, "Save your labor, I know him; he
is in doubt as to whether he made that half-promise or not--and, he
will give the thing the benefit of the doubt; he will fulfill that
half-promi