One day while at the Shermans, a friend, Mr. Haydock, asked me to go with him to see Grant’s log house. It is on the old Dent farm in the woods, seven miles southwest of the city. This now neglected land was given to Mrs. Grant by her father, at her marriage. When Grant was thirty-two, he saw no prospects ahead of him in the army; so he resigned and went out here in the woods to live. “I had no means to stock the farm,” he wrote later, “and a house had to be built. I worked very hard, never losing a day because of bad weather. If nothing else could be done, I would put a load of wood on the wagon and take it to the city for sale.” For four years, Grant and his family lived this obscure life here in a little log cabin he built with his own hands. The cabin is now hard to find. The road is deserted, the yard is overgrown with tall grass, straggling rose bushes bloom in what was once a garden; the windows of the cabin are gone, the doors stand open. Grant cut the trees, prepared and hauled the logs for the cabin himself, and a hired hand helped him to put them up. It is a typical Southern log house, one and a half stories high, two rooms below, separated by an open hall, two rooms above. There is no history of Grant’s life, during the years he struggled to make a living on this lonesome backwoods farm. Grant seldom alluded to it himself. While walking over the deserted cabin and yard, I saw in my mind its whilom owner, the guest of peoples and potentates. Sherman had an extravagant opinion of General Grant’s abilities. “Grant was the one level-headed man among us all,” he said to me one night, down in the basement of his home. Sherman went to the opera because he was fond of music, though he could not sing a note. If he kissed the pretty women behind the scenes sometimes, or more likely in front of the scenes, it was because the pretty women kissed him. I never saw a man so run after by womankind in my life. It was a great honor to have him touch their hands, their lips. Once in Switzerland, when he was leaving Bern on a train, the whole crowd of American women at the depot, old and young, pretty and ugly, children and all, kissed him. When I was leaving his home at St. Louis, Miss Lizzie said I should have something to remember my visit by. “Then I want something from the little basement,” I said, “there is where I have spent most of my time.” “Papa, why not give him your paper weight.” It was a little bronze bust of General Grant that he had used on his desk for many years. It has been mine since that evening, though I needed nothing to remind me forever of the hours spent far into the night down in the basement of the Sherman home. In April, I received an interesting letter from him on taxation: “ST. LOUIS, MO., April 25, 1886.