bring a
little added strength, or perhaps it was only resolution. Now and then
he appeared depressed as to the quality of his product. Once Colonel
Fred Grant suggested to Clemens that if he could encourage the General a
little it might be worth while. Clemens had felt always such a reverence
and awe for the great soldier that he had never dreamed of complimenting
his literature.

"I was as much surprised as Columbus's cook could have been to learn
that Columbus wanted his opinion as to how Columbus was doing his
navigating."

He did not hesitate to give it, however, and with a clear conscience.
Grant wrote as he had fought; with a simple, straightforward dignity,
with a style that is not a style at all but the very absence of it, and
therefore the best of all literary methods. It happened that Clemens had
been comparing some of Grant's chapters with Caesar's Commentaries,
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