I appealed to Clemens, bethinking myself of his
friendship with Grant and Grant's friendship with Arthur. I asked him to
write to Grant in my father's behalf, but No, he answered me, I must come
to Hartford, and we would go on to New York together and see Grant
personally. This was before, and long before, Clemens became Grant's
publisher and splendid benefactor, but the men liked each other as such
men could not help doing. Clemens made the appointment, and we went to
find Grant in his business office, that place where his business
innocence was afterward so betrayed. He was very simple and very
cordial, and I was instantly the more at home with him, because his voice
was the soft, rounded, Ohio River accent to which my years were earliest
used from my steamboating uncles, my earliest heroes. When I stated my
business he merely said, Oh no; that must not be; he would write to Mr.
Arthur; and he did so that day; and my father lived to lay down his
office, when he tired of it, with no urgence from above.

It is not irrelevant to Clemens to say that Grant seemed to like finding
himself in company with two literary men, one of whom at least he could
make sure of, and unlike that silent man he was reputed, he talked
constantly, and so far as he might he talked literature. At least he
talked of John Phoenix, that delightfulest of the early Pacific Slope
humorists, whom he had known under his real name of George H. Derby, when
they were fellow-cadets at West Point. It was mighty pretty, as Pepys
would say, to see the delicate deference Clemens paid our plain hero, and
the manly respect with which he listened. While Grant talked, his
luncheon was brought in from some unassuming restaurant near by, and he
asked us to join him in the baked beans and coffee which were served us
in a little room out of the office with about the same circumstance as at
a railroad refreshment-counter. The baked beans and coffee were of about
the railroad-refreshment quality; but eating them with Grant was like
sitting down to baked beans and coffee with Julius Caesar, or Alexander,
or some other great Plutarchan captain. One of the highest satisfactions
of Clemens's often supremely satisfactory life was his relation to Grant.
It was his proud joy to tell how he found Grant about to sign a contract
for his book on certainly very good terms, and said to him that he would
himself publish the book and give him a percentage three times as large.
He said G