July 4, 1885.--General Grant is still living this morning. Many a person between the two oceans lay hours awake last night listening for the booming of the fire bells which should speak to a nation in simultaneous voice and tell it its calamity. The bell strokes are to be thirty seconds apart and there will be sixty-three--the general's age. They will be striking in every town in the United States at the same moment--the first time in the world's history that the bells of a nation have tolled in unison--beginning at the same moment and ending at the same moment.
More than once, during two weeks, the nation stood watching with bated breath, expecting the news of General Grant's death.
The family, in their distress, desired spiritual help, and one Reverend Doctor N---- was sent for to furnish it. N---- had lately gone to California, where he had got a ten-thousand-dollar job to preach a funeral sermon over the son of an ex-governor, a millionaire; and a most remarkable sermon it was--and worth the money. If N---- got the facts right, neither he nor anybody else--any ordinary human being--was worthy to preach that youth's funeral sermon, and it was manifest that one of the disciples ought to have been imported into California for the occasion. N---- came on from California at once and began his ministration at the general's bedside; and, if one might trust his daily reports, the general had conceived a new and perfect interest in spiritual things. It is fair to presume that the most of N----'s daily reports originated in his own imagination.
Col. Fred Grant told me that his father was, in this matter, what he was in all matters and at all times--that is to say, perfectly willing to have family prayers going on, or anything else that could be satisfactory to anybody, or increase anybody's comfort in any way; but he also said that, while his father was a good man, and indeed as good as any man, Christian or otherwise, he was not a praying man.
Some of the speeches put into General Grant's mouth were to the last degree incredible to people who knew the general, since they were such gaudy and flowering misrepresentations of that plain-spoken man's utterances.
About the 14th or 15th of April, Reverend Mr. N---- reported that upon visiting the general in his sick chamber, the general pressed his hand and delivered himself of this astounding remark:
"Thrice have I been in the shadow of the Valley of Death and thrice have I come out again."
General Grant never used flowers of speech, and, dead or alive, he never could have uttered anything like that, either as a quotation or otherwise.
The Grant dictations ended here. General Grant died July 25, 1885. More than 300,000 sets, of two vols. each, of his Memoirs were sold.
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