When Wellington won Waterloo, a battle about on a level with any one of a dozen of your victories, sordid England tried to pay him for that service with wealth and grandeurs.  She made him a duke and gave him $4,000,000.  If you had done and suffered for any other country what you have done and suffered for your own you would have been affronted in the same sordid way.  But, thank God! this vast and rich and mighty republic is imbued to the core with a delicacy which will forever preserve her from so degrading you.

Your country loves you—­your country’s proud of you—­your country is grateful to you.  Her applauses, which have been many, thundering in your ears all these weeks and months, will never cease while the flag you saved continues to wave.

Your country stands ready from this day forth to testify her measureless love and pride and gratitude toward you in every conceivable—­inexpensive way.  Welcome to Hartford, great soldier, honored statesman, unselfish citizen.

Grant’s grim smile showed itself more than once during the speech, and when Clemens reached the sentence that spoke of his country rewarding him in “every conceivable—­inexpensive way” his composure broke up completely and he “nearly laughed his entire head off,” according to later testimony, while the spectators shouted their approval.

Grant’s son, Col.  Fred Grant,—­[Maj.-Gen’l, U. S. Army, 1906.  Died April, 1912.]—­dined at the Clemens home that night, and Rev. Joseph Twichell and Henry C. Robinson.  Twichell’s invitation was in the form of a telegram.  It said: 

    I want you to dine with us Saturday half past five and meet Col. 
    Fred Grant.  No ceremony.  Wear the same shirt you always wear.

The campaign was at its height now, and on the evening of October 26th there was a grand Republican rally at the opera-house with addresses by Charles Dudley Warner, Henry C. Robinson, and Mark Twain.  It was an unpleasant, drizzly evening, but the weather had no effect on their audience.  The place was jammed and packed, the aisles, the windows, and the gallery railings full.  Hundreds who came as late as the hour announced for the opening were obliged to turn back, for the building had been thronged long before.  Mark Twain’s speech that night is still remembered in Hartford as the greatest effort of his life.  It was hardly that, except to those who were caught in the psychology of the moment, the tumult and the shouting of patriotism, the surge and sweep of the political tide.  The roaring delight of the audience showed that to them at least it was convincing.  Howells wrote that he had read it twice, and that he could not put it out of his mind.  Whatever its general effect was need not now be considered.  Garfield was elected, and perhaps Grant’s visit to Hartford and the great mass-meeting that followed contributed their mite to that result.