I could understand that feeling.  He had set out to conquer not the habit but the inclination—­the desire.  He had gone at the root, not the trunk.  It’s the perfect way and the only true way (I speak from experience.) How I do hate those enemies of the human race who go around enslaving God’s free people with pledges—­to quit drinking instead of to quit wanting to drink.

But Sherman and Van Vliet know everything concerning Grant; and if you tell them how you want to use the facts, both of them will testify.  Regular army men have no concealments about each other; and yet they make their awful statements without shade or color or malice with a frankness and a child-like naivety, indeed, which is enchanting-and stupefying.  West Point seems to teach them that, among other priceless things not to be got in any other college in this world.  If we talked about our guild-mates as I have heard Sherman, Grant, Van Vliet and others talk about theirs—­mates with whom they were on the best possible terms—­we could never expect them to speak to us again.

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I am reminded, now, of another matter.  The day of the funeral I sat an hour over a single drink and several cigars with Van Vliet and Sherman and Senator Sherman; and among other things Gen. Sherman said, with impatient scorn: 

“The idea of all this nonsense about Grant not being able to stand rude language and indelicate stories!  Why Grant was full of humor, and full of the appreciation of it.  I have sat with him by the hour listening to Jim Nye’s yarns, and I reckon you know the style of Jim Nye’s histories, Clemens.  It makes me sick—­that newspaper nonsense.  Grant was no namby-pamby fool, he was a man—­all over—­rounded and complete.”

I wish I had thought of it!  I would have said to General Grant:  “Put the drunkenness in the Memoirs—­and the repentance and reform.  Trust the people.”

But I will wager there is not a hint in the book.  He was sore, there.  As much of the book as I have read gives no hint, as far as I recollect.

The sick-room brought out the points of Gen. Grant’s character—­some of them particularly, to wit: 

His patience; his indestructible equability of temper; his exceeding gentleness, kindness, forbearance, lovingness, charity; his loyalty:  to friends, to convictions, to promises, half-promises, infinitesimal fractions and shadows of promises; (There was a requirement of him which I considered an atrocity, an injustice, an outrage; I wanted to implore him to repudiate it; Fred Grant said, “Save your labor, I know him; he is in doubt as to whether he made that half-promise or not—­and, he will give the thing the benefit of the doubt; he will fulfill that half-promise or kill himself trying;” Fred Grant was right—­he did fulfill it;) his aggravatingly trustful nature; his genuineness, simplicity, modesty, diffidence, self-depreciation, poverty in the quality of vanity-and,