taries, and
was able to say, in all sincerity, that the same high merits
distinguished both books: clarity of statement, directness, simplicity,
manifest truthfulness, fairness and justice toward friend and foe alike,
soldierly candor and frankness, and soldierly avoidance of flowery
speech.

"I placed the two books side by side upon the same level," he said, "and
I still think that they belong there. I learned afterward that General
Grant was pleased with this verdict. It shows that he was just a man,
just a human being, just an author."

Within two months after the agents had gone to work canvassing for the
Grant Memoirs--which is to say by the 1st of May, 1885--orders for sixty
thousand sets had been received, and on that day Mark Twain, in his
note-book, made a memorandum estimate of the number of books that the
country would require, figuring the grand total at three hundred thousand
sets of two volumes each. Then he says:

If these chickens should really hatch according to my account,
General Grant's royalties will' amount to $420,000, and will make
the largest single check ever paid an author in the world's history.
Up to the present time the largest one ever paid was to Macaulay on
his History of England, L20,000. If I pay the General in silver
coin at $12 per pound it will weigh seventeen tons.

Certainly this has a flavor in it of Colonel Sellers, but we shall see by
and by in how far this calculation was justified.

Grant found the society of Mark Twain cheering and comforting, and
Clemens held himself in readiness to go to the dying man at call. On the
26th of May he makes this memorandum:

It is curious and dreadful to sit up in this way and talk cheerful
nonsense to General Grant, and he under sentence of death with that
cancer. He says he has made the book too large by 200 pages--not a
bad fault. A short time ago we were afraid we would lack 400 of
being enough.

To-day talked with General Grant about his and my first great
Missouri campaign in 1861. He surprised an empty camp near Florida,
Missouri, on Salt River, which I had been occupying a day or two
before. How near he came to playing the devil with his future
publisher.

Of course Clemens would amuse the old commander with the tale of his
soldiering, how his company had been chased through the brush and mud by
the very announcement that Grant was coming. Some word of this got