Night after night, day after day, I read among the letters, picking out only those that seemed of interest to the public, and to be perfectly proper to print. At that time I edited for the North American Review six chapters of them. Nothing went without General Sherman’s approval. He allowed his clerk, Mr. Barrett, to copy for me. Hundreds of the most entertaining letters I regarded it indiscreet to print at that time, and they have never been printed yet. The General and myself sat there in the basement by the little open fire many a time till twelve or one o’clock at night; I looking through the almost thousands of letters and papers, he smoking a cigar and reading. The poems of Burns lay there on his desk all the time, because Burns was his favorite poet. Dickens and Scott, he read time and again; some of the stories once a year, he said. When I would find something of especial interest among the letters, I would speak of it. He would stop reading and, for an hour, tell me all about it, and add interesting things concerning the writer. What would I not now give could my memory recall faithfully his talks to me in the silence of those nights. He suffered some with asthma, and it was always easier for him to sit up far into the night and talk, than to go to bed. Sometimes a wee drop from a black bottle in the back room refreshed us both, without harming either. About this time, a few over-zealous friends of Grant, not satisfied with the world’s recognition of his genius, were claiming for him the impossible merit of everything that happened in the war, even the origin of the March to the Sea. The claim was ridiculous, and I do not believe that General Grant personally had anything to do with it. But I am sure that Sherman felt that Grant ought to have spoken at this juncture. One evening I came across an autograph letter from Grant to Sherman, congratulating him on the achievement of the March to the Sea, “a campaign,” in Grant’s words, “the like of which has not been read of in past history.” There was not a thought of claiming any of the glory for himself. Right beside it lay a letter from Robert E. Lee, telling how this movement of Sherman’s resulted eventually in the fall of Richmond. Reading these, determined me, while with General Sherman in his home, to write, myself, an account of the March to the Sea, for the North American Review. My article was printed in the Review, September, 1887. When it was finished I asked the General to listen to it. He sent upstairs one morning for Mrs. Sherman to come down and hear it also. “Let me read it aloud,” said Mrs. Sherman. It was one of the delightful hours of my life, to sit there and hear the wife of the great soldier read to him my story of his March to the Sea. I watched his face while she read, and could see that his mind was again afire with the thought of the campaign. He made no important changes, and a note to the editor of the Review showed that he approved my paper fully.