into their caverns beneath the bushy brows and all
but disappeared. Their gaze was more and more detached from earth and
set on some dim, invisible shore. Deeper and deeper sank the furrows in
his ashen face. The shoulders drooped beneath a weight too great for any
human soul to bear.

To Betty Winter's expression of loyalty and sympathy he answered sadly:

"It's success I need, child,--not sympathy. My own burdens of cares are
as nothing to my soul. It's our cause--our cause--the Union must live or
I shall die!"

He sat sometimes by his window for hours immovable as a marble statue,
his deep, hungry eyes gazing, gazing forever over the shining river
toward the Southern hills. His Secretaries stepped softly about the room
in silent sympathy with the Chief they loved with passionate devotion.

Grant had crossed the Rapidan on that glorious spring morning in May
with his magnificent army accompanied by the highest hopes of millions.
And there had followed those awful sickening battles, one after
another, until he had fallen back in failure before the impassable
trenches around Petersburg.

The star of Grant, the conquering hero of the West, had apparently set
in a sea of blood.

Lee, with inferior numbers, alert, resourceful, vigilant, had checked
and baffled him at every turn, and Richmond's fall was no nearer to
human eye than in 1862.

The miles and miles of hospital barracks in Washington, crowded to their
doors with wounded, dying men, were the living witnesses of the Nation's
mortal agony. Every city, town, village, hamlet and county in the North
was in mourning. Death had literally flung its pall over the world.

From these thousands of stricken homes there had slowly risen a storm of
protest against the new leader of the Army. The word "Butcher" was on
every lip. General Grant, they said, possessed merely the qualities of
the bulldog fighter--tenacity and persistence. He held what he had won
so long as men were poured into his ranks by tens of thousands to take
the place of the dead. They declared that he possessed no genius, no
strategic skill, no power to originate plans and devise means to
overcome his skillful and brilliant antagonist. The demand was pressed
on the President for his removal.

His refusal had brought on him the blame for all the blood and all the
suffering and all the failures of the past bitter year.

His answer to his critics was remorseless in its common sense, but added
nothing