If these chickens should really hatch according to my account, General Grant’s royalties will’ amount to $420,000, and will make the largest single check ever paid an author in the world’s history.  Up to the present time the largest one ever paid was to Macaulay on his History of England, L20,000.  If I pay the General in silver coin at $12 per pound it will weigh seventeen tons.

Certainly this has a flavor in it of Colonel Sellers, but we shall see by and by in how far this calculation was justified.

Grant found the society of Mark Twain cheering and comforting, and Clemens held himself in readiness to go to the dying man at call.  On the 26th of May he makes this memorandum: 

It is curious and dreadful to sit up in this way and talk cheerful nonsense to General Grant, and he under sentence of death with that cancer.  He says he has made the book too large by 200 pages—­not a bad fault.  A short time ago we were afraid we would lack 400 of being enough.

To-day talked with General Grant about his and my first great Missouri campaign in 1861.  He surprised an empty camp near Florida, Missouri, on Salt River, which I had been occupying a day or two before.  How near he came to playing the devil with his future publisher.

Of course Clemens would amuse the old commander with the tale of his soldiering, how his company had been chased through the brush and mud by the very announcement that Grant was coming.  Some word of this got to the Century editors, who immediately proposed that Mark Twain contribute to the magazine War Series the story of his share in the Rebellion, and particularly of his war relations with General Grant.  So the “Private History of a Campaign that Failed” was prepared as Mark Twain’s side-light on the history of the Rebellion; and if it was not important history it was at least amusing, and the telling of that tale in Mark Twain’s inimitable fashion must have gone far toward making cheerful those last sad days of his ancient enemy.

During one of their talks General Grant spoke of the question as to whether he or Sherman had originated the idea of the march to the sea.  Grant said: 

“Neither of us originated the idea of that march.  The enemy did it.”

Reports were circulated of estrangements between General Grant and the Century Company, and between Mark Twain and the Century Company, as a result of the book decision.  Certain newspapers exploited and magnified these rumors—­some went so far as to accuse Mark Twain of duplicity, and to charge him with seeking to obtain a vast fortune for himself at the expense of General Grant and his family.  All of which was the merest nonsense.  The Century Company, Webster & Co., General Grant, and Mark Twain individually, were all working harmoniously, and nothing but the most cordial relations and understanding prevailed.  As to the charge of unfair dealing on the part of Mark Twain, this was too absurd, even then, to attract more than momentary attention.  Webster & Co., somewhat later in the year, gave to the press a clear statement of their publishing arrangement, though more particularly denying the report that General Grant had been unable to complete his work.