It was not long after that he was at Appomattox and the first to issue rations to the hungry Confederates who had just surrendered, and no act of his life gave him quite as much satisfaction as to have been the first to pour his whole supply of hardtack into the blankets of those whom still and always he remembered as of his own blood. And that done, after they had ridden into Richmond, he was relieved and was soon back in Washington calling on Chase again. Chase asked him what he could do for him, and my grandfather said there was but one thing in the world he wanted: namely, to go home; and a request so simple was granted with that alacrity with which politicians grant requests that, in their scope, fall so short of what might have been expected. But it was not long until Chase’s influence was requested in a more substantial matter, and in 1870 my grandfather, with his wife and two younger daughters, was on his way across the Atlantic to Nuremberg, where President Grant had appointed him consul. It was not, of course, until after his return from the foreign experience that my conscious acquaintance with him began. But when they returned and opened the old house, and filled it with the spoil of their European travel,--some wonderful mahogany furniture and Dresden china, and other objects of far more delight to us children,--he and I began a friendship which lasted until his death, and was marred by no misunderstanding, except, perhaps, as to the number of hours his saddle-horse should be ridden on the gallop, and the German he wished me to read to him out of the little black-bound volumes of Schiller and Goethe, which for years were his companions. He held, no doubt with some show of reason on his side, that if he could master the language after he was sixty, I might learn at least to read it before I was sixteen. The task had its discouragements, not lightened, even in after years, when I read in their famous and delightful correspondence Carlyle’s advice to Emerson to possess himself of the German language; it could be done, wrote Carlyle, in six weeks! But, like Emerson, I was afflicted with the postponement and debility of the blond constitution, and I observed that, except in great moments of unappreciated sacrifice, my grandfather preferred to read his German himself rather than to listen to my renditions.