events has seen
fit to record was that given to General Grant after the close of the
Civil War. At the Fifth Avenue Hotel a number of the city's leading
business men met and planned the public greeting, and one hundred and
fifty men subscribed one hundred dollars apiece. The reception to the
returning soldier, which took place at the Fifth Avenue Hotel November
20, 1865, was hardly one of which the city or the street had reason to
be proud.

Loose management led to disorder and dissatisfaction. Twenty-five
hundred jostling, pushing persons crowded the halls, corridors, and
reception rooms. The General stood in one of the hotel parlours
surrounded by the committee, with Mrs. Grant and other ladies to his
right, and on his left Generals Wool, Cook, and Hooker, John Van Buren,
Ethan Allen, and others.

Little judgment seems to have been used in issuing the invitations. The
throng was indiscriminate. Farce comedy was in the air. Religious
fanatics, passing before the hero, offered up prayers for the salvation
of his soul. Precocious children were thrust forward to his attention.
Preposterous questions were propounded by preposterous people. To add to
the confusion the names of those persons who fought their way through
the throng to be presented to the General were announced to him by a
little man who got most of them wrong.

In a postscript to his "American Notes," written many years later,
Charles Dickens told of the vast changes he found on the occasion of his
second visit to the United States--"changes moral, changes physical,
changes in the amount of land subdued and peopled, changes in the rise
of vast new cities, changes in the growth of older cities almost out of
recognition, changes in the graces and amenities of life." Making all
allowances for that greater charity, tolerance, and kindliness of
judgment which comes with the riper years--nobody ever could have
remained as Britishly bumptious, or as bumptiously British as Dickens
was in his younger days when he first came to pay us a visit--taking
also into consideration the fact that a certain explanatory softening of
earlier criticisms was politic, that the novelist found a city far more
to his taste in 1868 than he had found in 1842 is not for a moment to be
questioned. Also, at the time he came to New York from Boston, he was
naturally in a rather placid and contented mood. For in letters home,
even while complaining of the trying changes of the wintry clima