15. In the spring of 1885 it became known that General Ulysses S. Grant was stricken with a fatal malady. The announcement at once drew to the General and ex-President the interest and sympathies of the whole American people. The hero of Vicksburg and Appomattox sank under the ravages of a malignant cancer, which had fixed itself in his throat. On the 23d of July, 1885, he expired at a summer cottage on Mount McGregor, New York. His last days were hallowed by the love of the nation which he had so gloriously defended. No funeral west of the Atlantic--not even that of Lincoln--was more universally observed. The procession in New York City was perhaps as imposing a pageant as was ever exhibited in honor of the dead. On the 8th of August the body of General Grant was laid to rest in Riverside Park, overlooking the Hudson. There, on the summit from which may be seen the great river and the metropolis of the nation, is the tomb of him whose courage and magnanimity in war will forever give him rank with the few master spirits who have honored the human race and changed the course of history. 16. Within scarcely more than a year from the funeral of Grant several other distinguished Union Generals fell. On the 29th of October General George B. McClellan died at his home at St. Cloud, New Jersey. After another brief interval General Winfield S. Hancock, senior Major-General of the American Army, breathed his last. In the mean time, within a brief period, Generals Irwin McDowell, Ambrose E. Burnside, Joseph Hooker, and George G. Meade, each of whom, in a critical period of the war, had commanded the Army of the Potomac, passed away. Before the close of 1886 Major-General John A. Logan, greatest of the volunteer commanders, who, without previous military education, won for themselves distinguished honors in the War for the Union, fell sick and died at his home, called Calumet Place, in Washington City. [Illustration: Thomas A. Hendricks.] [Sidenote: =Death of Prominent Civilians.=]