e place. He liked the freedom of it,
with his horses and other live stock. Despite its hardships he
welcomed it as an escape from the petty exactions of military life.

Nevertheless, he could not make it pay. He did not have sufficient
capital or bodily strength to succeed. An attack of chills and fever,
in 1858, put the finishing touch to this episode, and he sold his stock
and farm the following spring.

During the ensuing few months he moved from pillar to post, trying
various ventures and succeeding with none. The fates seemed against
him. In St. Louis, whither he had drifted, he was regarded with open
scorn as, what we would now designate, a "down-and-out." One reason
for his poor success lay in the fact that he was a Northerner, and the
city was seething with talk of secession. The clouds of Civil War were
already gathering, and men began to distrust each his neighbor.

At this juncture his father, who seems rather to have turned against
him also, came to his relief. He offered Ulysses a position in his
leather business, now in charge of the younger boys. Ulysses
thankfully accepted, although the pay was only fifty dollars a month.
He brought his wife and boys to Galena, where at any rate he was sure
of having a roof over his head.

"The brothers found him of no earthly account at driving bargains, or
tending store," says General Charles King. "He could keep books after
a fashion and do some of the heavy work in handling the miscellaneous
stock."

Another soldier, who became his devoted follower in the later days, had
his first sight of Grant at this down-at-the-heels period. "I went
round to the store," he says; "it was a sharp winter morning, and there
wasn't a sign of a soldier or one that looked like a soldier about the
shop. But pretty soon a farmer drove up with a lot of hides on his
sleigh, and went inside to dicker, and presently a stoop-shouldered,
brownish-bearded fellow, with a slouch hat pulled down over his eyes,
who had been sitting whittling at the stove when I was inside, came
out, pulling on an old light-blue soldier's overcoat. He flung open
the doors leading down into the cellar, laid hold of the top hide,
frozen stiff it was, tugged it loose, towed it over, and slung it down
the chute. Then one by one, all by himself, he heaved off the rest of
them, a ten minutes' tough job in that weather, until he had got the
last of them down the cellar; then slouched back into the store