backing, and from the standpoint of the Republican party it looked like a political necessity. Grant had always stood for sound money and specie payments, but in this crisis he imagined himself converted by the arguments of perfectly sincere advisers.

He prepared a memorandum of the arguments which would induce him to sign the Inflation Bill. But his own stanchness told him that the way to avoid obstacles is to march straight toward them. For eight nights he lay sleepless, conscious that the country was crying for aspirin for its financial headache. On the ninth day he tore up his own memorandum of "good reasons." He vetoed the Inflation Bill.

In those years of nagging responsibility and frequent false position, we get one glimpse of the real Grant. Walt Whitman's friend Peter Doyle, was at that time a street-car conductor in Washington. As his car passed the White House, Doyle used sometimes to see Grant leaving alone and on foot.

Doyle would stop his car and beckon the President to get on, but Grant shook his head at him. When his car was returning from the end of the line, Doyle always looked for Grant in a certain dooryard. A widow about sixty years old, a friend of obscure Western days, lived in a humble cottage just a good walk from the White House. When Grant stole an hour from a busy morning, she would interrupt her housework and come to the kitchen window to talk to him. His shyness before crowds had earned Grant a reputation for silence. But he could whittle at a stick outside the kitchen window

of an old friend and talk by the hour. He was a plain man who liked to visit with "folks."

Grant returned to private life with a feeling of relief. In the vacuum that follows the Presidency he decided on a visit to his married daughter in England. It was such a visit as any other devoted father pays to a daughter whom he misses hourly from his own household. Ex-Presidents had gone abroad before, and had been allowed to proceed as private citizens.

But Grant was not properly an ex-President. He was the conquering general in the greatest war within the experience of living men. Crowds saw him off in New York. Greater crowds greeted him in England. His quiet journey turned itself into the progress of a ruling sovereign. It was protracted into a trip around the world.

From ovation to ovation went that quiet slightly stooped figure, enduring the applause of multitudes as he might have endured a visit to the dentist's. "I was working on an Illinois newspaper the year that Grant returned from his trip around the world," runs an unpublished letter of a contemporary. "I was sent down to Mendota, Illinois, to join the special train which was bringing him home to Galena.

"Grant was the most casual person on the whole train. There was a hurrahing crowd at every station, but usually Grant didn't even turn his head to look out of the window. Once when there was an especially large crowd with decorations and bouquets, some one went up and advised him to speak to his admirers.

Grant walked out to the platform of the car and bowed slightly to right and left. Then he turned on his heel and returned to his seat."

When his third term boom had collapsed, it seemed as if drama had got through with Grant. He had left the White House a poor man, but admirers in New York and Washington had given him houses, and New York financiers subscribed to a fund from which an annual income was paid him. His children were creditably settled in life, his wife was at his side. Grant settled down in New York to spend his last years in

content.

Once more came an unforeseen turn of events. Grant's son Ulysses had induced him to go into business with a young Napoleon of Wall Street by the name of Ferdinand Ward. Grant specified that the new private-banking firm of Grant and Ward should have nothing to do with government contracts, and that no use should be made of his real or supposed standing as a former President. In his simplicity he supposed that that settled the matter.

Young Ward used Grant's name for all it was worth. When his house of cards began to totter he used Grant's personal credit. The bubble burst. Grant and Ward failed, and General Grant was left bankrupt. He sat in his handsome house in New York without money to buy ordinary housekeeping supplies. To clear his personal debt to W. H. Vanderbilt he turned over his farm, his wife's real estate, even his Civil War relics. The ruin was complete.

To a tired and aging man this disaster might well have seemed final. It took calamity to bring

out the stuff of which Grant was made.

Some time before, the editor of THE CENTURY had asked Grant to write a series of articles on the Civil War. Grant had refused. He took so little interest in military memoirs that he never even read them, let alone wrote them. Writing was not his trade, and anyhow he had no trace of the professional veteran in his make-up. The only time any one ever caught him talking about past campaigns was when he met Lee to receive his surrender. Then the badly embarrassed conqueror plunged into "Don't you remember" talk of the Mexican War, when he had served on Lee's staff. Lee finally had to recall him to the business in hand.

But after the failure of Grant and Ward, the editor renewed his offer. This time Grant accepted. He needed the money that such articles would bring. Writing would take his mind off mind off his troubles. He had habitually written his own despatches, and had had no difficulty in saying what he meant. With the hope that he might manage a creditable article, Grant sat down to write about Shiloh.

The greatest surprise of his life awaited him. He found that he could write and that he liked to write. He had the faculty of narrative in an unusual degree. The characteristic directness of his approach solved problems of proportion and arrangement. The article on Shiloh was followed by Vicksburg, Chattanooga and the Wilderness. Then the work developed into two volumes of admirable Memoirs.

Yet if it had been a failure as a

book, Grant's Memoirs would have remained as a monument of quiet heroism. The first volume was written in a cloud of worldly disaster. The second was written under sentence of death. Between the two, Grant had discovered that he had cancer of the throat.

The certainty that he was going to die brought with it a renewed necessity for making some provision for his dependents. Anyhow, he never turned back when he had set his hand to a job. His book was before him. When the first shock of his discovery had passed, he set himself to finish all that he had earlier planned. Propped up in a chair when he could no longer breathe lying down, scrawling with a pencil because he could not sit at a desk, dictating when he could not speak above a whisper, Grant took his book up to the conclusion. He closed the text with the sentence, "I hope the good feeling inaugurated may continue to

the end." He wrote a short manly preface, finishing with the paragraph, "With these remarks I present these volumes to the public, asking no favor, but hoping they will meet the approval of the reader."

Three weeks later he was dead.

A short figure, slightly stooped. A glance honest rather than keen. Thin lips closed on a cigar: a cigar is good company for a lonely man. A private's blouse with a general's shoulder straps sewed on for identification. Attention always fixed, not on the crowd, not on posterity, but on the job in hand.

This is no glamourous hero about whom legends will cluster. But picturesqueness goes out of date. Fresh laurels fade. Strength and stanchness are the only solid foundation for renown. In any case they inspire respect, but combined with Grant's singular simplicity they can be dwelt on only with a certain tenderness.

A

I

N apartment? No-no I cannot say that I do know of an apartment for rent." It was the concierge of Number 1 Place des Vosges who spoke to me. "Ah, but yes, monsieur, there is one just the throw of a stone from the Square. Mais sacré nom! why did I not think of it before? Of course there is an apartment. Do you know Madame Leconte, not the old one, but the young Madame Leconte, she who is now sixty if she is a day?"

With regret I admitted that I did not know the young Madame Leconte who is sixty, and it was with difficulty that I restrained myself from asking how old was the elder Madame Leconte. Such questions avail little and only delay what progress is possible in a Parisian conversation.

"But it makes little difference, monsieur, whether you know her or whether you know her not. She is not a pleasant woman and to know her is to know misfortune. But this is what I would say; her sister died but last month. She had been sick for so long. Sometimes the doctors held out hope and then the devil himself could not hope and so she died one day. It is as I was saying, the sister of Madame Leconte died and there is your apartment for you. Voila!"

Slowly my Saxon mind followed these convolutions of Latin thought.

"But how, madame, does that dispose of the other worthy female Leconte and allow me to occupy her lodgings?"

"How?" she responded. "But of course!"

"But of course what, madame?" This time I was rigidly stared at and upon. Then as a weary schoolmaster to a very dull student she explained in a way that there might be no misunderstanding for even the slowest intelligence.

"Madame Leconte is a very old woman. The death of her sister has been a great shock and has precipitated her normally bad health to a dangerous degree. She has not many more days to look upon the pleasant Place des Vosges and I think, monsieur, that if you return in a month you will find Madame Leconte gone and the apartment ready for your occupancy."

I thanked Madame la Concierge and fled to some kind spot where the sun shines and children play. It is food for thought that some day your own concierge may be renting your own apartment out from under your very death-bed so to speak.

Yes, of course, this really happened; and though it was the first

time that death and apartments had entered my life in the same breath, I had heard of such things before. I understand that there is a good sized army of people who march the Ile St.-Louis every day in the hope that they may cross a funeral and find an apartment. They are the very nicest of people and most of them are the expatriated Americans that one is always hearing about and never seeing. I have a friend who tells me that he has waited six years for an apartment that has taken his eye. It is a game that they play. "If you die first I get the apartment, if I die first some one else gets it."

Then there is a woman I know, who watched for four years and moved in as the funeral moved out; but it was well worth while, for she has the most perfect apartment in all the world. It is on the Ile St.Louis and looks down the Seine. There is the Ile de la Cité before her very windows, and always to charm even the most jaded taste, the graceful gray mysteries of Notre Dame, which every hour of every day and every day of every year changes and offers an ever new beauty. But what I envy her most is that she can see, whenever she so desires, the graceful and beautiful spire of the most beautiful of all chapels, La Flèche de la Sainte-Chapelle.

These are not curious incidents in a very large city. There are many such. I sometimes think that a similar story might be tagged to every desirable spot in Paris. There is an artist, I know, who once attended a studio party in some corner of the Rive Gauche. Now the charm of this studio was that in the evening and when there was a moon, the great

window was ever a pattern of delicate lacy fabric. There was a tree that grew beside the house, whose branches in the evening's darkness made a fairy tapestry that lived and moved as the wind blew among the branches. The artist went the next day to the owner of the house and inquired how much was the rent and for how long the lease. The rent was little but the lease was one of those perpetual affairs that run on and on forever. They are only found in Paris. This man waited eight years before he could have his heart's desire, and the evening he moved in he gave a party. There was moonlight and candle-light and there was much gaiety, but there was no lacy pattern on the studio windows. The tree had died and been cut down the year before.

219

I have told all this merely to indicate how deep into the heart an apartment in Paris goes. It is almost a religion. Like an estate is it passed along in the family. Like horses are they traded. Pick up a French newspaper and you will find almost a page. filled with the drama of human life and apartments. Aliteral translation of almost any one of the advertisements might read:

"Apartment-fifteen pieces, all modern, chauffage central [an indefinite and meaningless term], all accoutrements and in a beautiful statesituated in Neuilly-will exchange for ten pieces or more near to the Porte St.-Denis."

There is an extraordinary similarity in these advertisements. Sometimes a baby-carriage is thrown in as an added inducement and once to my knowledge a tandem bicycle.