He accepted and agreed to speak.  They had asked him to respond to the toast of “The Ladies,” but for him the subject was worn out.  He had already responded to that toast at least twice.  He telegraphed that there was one class of the community that had always been overlooked upon such occasions, and that if they would allow him to do so he would take that class for a toast:  the babies.  Necessarily they agreed, and he prepared himself accordingly.

He arrived in Chicago in time for the prodigious procession of welcome.  Grant was to witness the march from a grand reviewing stand, which had been built out from the second story of the Palmer House.  Clemens had not seen the General since the “embarrassing” introduction in Washington, twelve years before.  Their meeting was characteristic enough.  Carter Harrison, Mayor of Chicago, arriving with Grant, stepped over to Clemens, and asked him if he wouldn’t like to be presented.  Grant also came forward, and a moment later Harrison was saying: 

“General, let me present Mr. Clemens, a man almost as great as yourself.”  They shook hands; there was a pause of a moment, then Grant said, looking at him gravely: 

“Mr. Clemens, I am not embarrassed, are you?”

So he remembered that first, long-ago meeting.  It was a conspicuous performance.  The crowd could not hear the words, but they saw the greeting and the laugh, and cheered both men.

Following the procession, there were certain imposing ceremonies of welcome at Haverly’s Theater where long, laudatory eloquence was poured out upon the returning hero, who sat unmoved while the storm of music and cheers and oratory swept about him.  Clemens, writing of it that evening to Mrs. Clemens, said: 

    I never sat elbow to elbow with so many historic names before. 
    Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Schofield, Pope, Logan, and so on.

What an iron man Grant is!  He sat facing the house, with his right leg crossed over his left, his right boot sole tilted up at an angle, and his left hand and arm reposing on the arm of his chair.  You note that position?  Well, when glowing references were made to other grandees on the stage, those grandees always showed a trifle of nervous consciousness, and as these references came frequently the nervous changes of position and attitude were also frequent.  But Grant!  He was under a tremendous and ceaseless bombardment of praise and congratulation; but as true as I’m sitting here he never moved a muscle of his body for a single instant during thirty minutes!  You could have played him on a stranger for an effigy.  Perhaps he never would have moved, but at last a speaker made such a particularly ripping and blood-stirring remark about him that the audience rose and roared and yelled and stamped and clapped an entire minute—­Grant sitting as serene as ever-when General Sherman stepped up to him, laid his hand affectionately on his shoulder, bent