The Reverend Doctor N---Visits General Grant(Dictated in 1885)

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 calamity¹. 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 tolled² 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 distress³, 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 remarkable⁴ sermon it was--and worth the money. If N---- got the facts right, neither he nor anybody else--any ordinary human being--was worthy⁵ to preach that youth's funeral sermon, and it was manifest that one of the disciples⁶ 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, perfectly⁷ 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,

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