drunkard. He met on an anniversary occasion a number of his old boon companions. They were urging him to celebrate it with them in the usual way, and he finally said: 'Boys, I must stick to my principles, but if you could get some whiskey into my water unbeknownst to me I might join you!'

“The General after that made no effort to capture Jefferson Davis, and regretted that he did. not reach the schooner in which he was intending an escape to Cuba, because once out of the country he never could have returned, and when arrested the difficulty which Mr. Lincoln had anticipated arose, and the situation was only solved by Horace Greeley becoming his bondsman.

"The General told me another interesting story of Mr. Lincoln, which brings out in a very clear light the humanity which was the dominating element of his character. After Sherman had reached the boundary line between North Carolina and Virginia his army was spread out over the railway and roads leading from Richmond south. The General said to the President that there were two ways open for his army-one to remain where it was and compel the surrender of

Lee's forces, after Grant had driven them out of Richmond, by cutting off their supplies and means of escape; the other to join General Grant and crush the Confederate forces at once. Lincoln's answer was decisive and peremptory: 'Take the course which will shed the least blood.'

“I heard General Sherman once narrate a very striking battle incident. He had rallied his troops and led them to a charge which was everywhere successful. As he rode into the enemy's camp, he saw a soldier lying on a barrow and an officer standing over him with an uplifted knife. He shouted to the officer not to strike, and spurred up to the group to discover that the men were both dead; the only solution being that the officer, who was a surgeon, was in the act of performing an operation for the extraction of a bullet upon the soldier when the concussion of a cannonball passing near them had killed them both, and they had stiffened in the attitude they occupied at the moment when their lives went out.

"As General Sherman was riding one day with his staff on the march through Georgia, they came upon an old planter sitting upon his front piazza,

and they rode in for a drink of water. The old gentleman said: 'General, I saw on one of the regimental flags, the 100th Iowa. The last I heard of Iowa it was an uninhabited territory. Has that got a hundred regiments of 1,000 men each in your army now?'

"Yes.'

"Well, said the old planter, 'if Iowa has got 100 regiments in your army and the rest of your States have sent regiments in proportion, you must have more than a million. We better give up at once.'"

BY PRESIDENT HARRISON.*

"THE death of William Tecumseh Sherman, is

an event that will bring sorrow to the heart of every patriotic citizen. No living American was so loved and venerated as he. To look upon his face, to hear his name, was to have one's love of country intensified. He served his country not for fame, not out of a sense of professional duty, but for love of the flag and of the beneficent civil institutions of which it was the emblem.

"He was an ideal soldier, and shared to the fullest the esprit du corps of the army, but he cherished the civil institutions organized under the Constitution, and was only a soldier that these might be perpetuated in undiminished usefulness and honor. He was in nothing an imitator. A

* In response to our letter to President Harrison to furnish a contribution for this book, he writes that it would be a labor of love for him to do so, but on account of pressing public duties it would be impossible. But he sends us the tribute above.

profound student of military science and precedent, he drew from them principles and suggestions and so adapted them to novel conditions. that his campaigns will continue to be the profitable study of the military profession throughout the world. His genial nature made him comrade to every soldier of the great Union Army. No presence was so welcome and inspiring at the camp fire or commandery as his. His career was complete; his honors were full. He had received from the Government the highest rank known to our military establishment, and from the people unstinted gratitude and love."