which he himself began when late in life he lost his money and which he finished with the pains of death upon him, is a surprising, in some ways pathetic, figure.  He had been a shy country boy, ready enough at all the work of a farm and good with horses, but with none of the business aptitude that make a successful farmer, when his father made him go to West Point.  Here he showed no great promise and made few friends; his health became delicate, and he wanted to leave the army and become a teacher of mathematics.  But the Mexican War, one of the most unjust in all history, as he afterwards said, broke out, and—­so he later thought—­saved his life from consumption by keeping him in the open air.  After that he did retire, failed at farming and other ventures, and at thirty-nine, when the Civil War began, was as has been seen, a shabby-looking, shiftless fellow, pretty far gone in the habit of drink, and more or less occupied about a leather business of his father’s.  Rough in appearance and in manner he remained—­the very opposite of smart, the very opposite of versatile, the very opposite of expansive in speech or social intercourse.  Unlike many rough people, he had a really simple character—­truthful, modest, and kind; without varied interests, or complicated emotions, or much sense of fun, but thinking intensely on the problems that he did see before him, and in his silent way keenly sensitive on most of the points on which it is well to be sensitive.  His friends reckoned up the very few occasions on which he was ever seen to be angry; only one could be recalled on which he was angry on his own account; the cruelty of a driver to animals in his supply train, heartless neglect in carrying out the arrangements he had made for the comfort of the sick and wounded, these were the sort of occasions which broke down Grant’s habitual self-possession and good temper.  “He was never too anxious,” wrote Chaplain Eaton, who, having been set by him in charge of the negro refugees with his army, had excellent means of judging, “never too preoccupied with the great problems that beset him, to take a sincere and humane interest in the welfare of the most subordinate labourer dependent upon him.”  And he had delicacy of feeling in other ways.  Once in the crowd at some hotel, in which he mingled an undistinguished figure, an old officer under him tried on a lecherous story for the entertainment of the General, who did not look the sort of man to resent it; Grant, who did not wish to set down an older man roughly, and had no ready phrases, but had, as it happens, a sensitive skin, was observed to blush to the roots of his hair in exquisite discomfort.  It would be easy to multiply little recorded traits of this somewhat unexpected kind, which give grace to the memory of his determination in a duty which became very grim.