ways excused his failures and
deficiencies with the one unvarying formula, "We are responsible
for these things in his race--it is not fair to visit our fault upon
them--let him alone;" so they did let him alone, under compulsion, until
the great heart that was his shield was taken away; then--well they
simply couldn't stand him, and so they were excusable for determining
to discharge him--a thing which they mortally hated to do, and by lucky
accident were saved from the necessity of doing;) his toughness as
a bargainer when doing business for other people or for his country
(witness his "terms" at Donelson, Vicksburg, etc.; Fred Grant told me
his father wound up an estate for the widow and orphans of a friend in
St. Louis--it took several years; at the end every complication had been
straightened out, and the property put upon a prosperous basis; great
sums had passed through his hands, and when he handed over the papers
there were vouchers to show what had been done with every penny) and his
trusting, easy, unexacting fashion when doing business for himself (at
that same time he was paying out money in driblets to a man who was
running his farm for him--and in his first Presidency he paid every one
of those driblets again (total, $3,000 F. said,) for he hadn't a scrap
of paper to show that he had ever paid them before; in his dealings with
me he would not listen to terms which would place my money at risk and
leave him protected--the thought plainly gave him pain, and he put it
from him, waved it off with his hands, as one does accounts of crushings
and mutilations--wouldn't listen, changed the subject;) and his
fortitude! He was under, sentence of death last spring; he sat thinking,
musing, several days--nobody knows what about; then he pulled himself
together and set to work to finish that book, a colossal task for a
dying man. Presently his hand gave out; fate seemed to have got him
checkmated. Dictation was suggested. No, he never could do that; had
never tried it; too old to learn, now. By and by--if he could only do
Appomattox-well. So he sent for a stenographer, and dictated 9,000 words
at a single sitting!--never pausing, never hesitating for a word, never
repeating--and in the written-out copy he made hardly a correction. He
dictated again, every two or three days--the intervals were intervals
of exhaustion and slow recuperation--and at last he was able to tell me
that he had written more matter than could be g