to wait until they were in writing to make it. When he read over that part of the terms about side arms, horses and private property of the officers, he remarked, with some feeling, I thought, that this would have a happy effect upon his army.

Then, after a little further conversation, General Lee remarked to me again that their army was organized a little differently from the army of the United States (still maintaining by implication that we were two countries); that in their army the cavalrymen and artillerists owned their own horses; and he asked if he was to understand that the men who so owned their horses were to be permitted to retain them. I told him that as the terms were written they would not; that only the officers were permitted to take their private property. He then, after reading over the

terms a second time, remarked that that was clear.

I then said to him that I thought this would be about the last battle of the war - I sincerely hoped so; and I said further I took it that most of the men in the ranks were small farmers. The whole country had been so raided by the two armies that it was doubtful whether they would be able to put in a crop to carry themselves and their families through the next winter without the aid of the horses they were then riding. The United States did not want them and I would, therefore, instruct the officers I left behind to receive the paroles of his troops to let every man of the Confederate army who claimed to own a horse or mule take the animal to his home. Lee remarked again that this would have a happy effect.

He then sat down and wrote out the following letter:

HEADQUARTERS ARMY OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA,
April 9, 1865.

GENERAL: I received your letter of this date containing the terms of the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia as proposed by you. As they are substantially the same as those expressed in your letter of the 8th inst., they are accepted. I will proceed to designate the proper officers to carry the stipulations into effect.

LIEUT.-GENERAL U. S. GRANT.

R. E. LEE, General.

While duplicates of the two letters were being made, the Union generals present were severally presented to General Lee.

The much talked of surrendering of Lee's sword and my handing it back, this and much more that has been said about it is the purest romance. The word sword or side arms was not mentioned by either of us until I wrote it in the terms. There was no premeditation, and it did not occur to me until the moment I wrote it down. If I had happened to omit it, and General Lee had called my attention to it, I should have put it in the terms precisely as I acceded to the provision about the soldiers retaining their horses. General Lee, after all was completed and before taking his leave, remarked that his army was in a very bad condition for want of food, and that they were without forage; that his men had been living for some days on parched corn exclusively, and that he would have to ask me for rations and forage. I told him "certainly," and asked for how many men he wanted rations. His answer was "about twenty-five thousand:" and I authorized him to send his own commissary and quartermaster to Appomattox Station, two or three miles away, where he could have, out of the trains we had stopped, all the provisions wanted. As for forage, we had ourselves depended almost entirely upon the country for that.

Generals Gibbon, Griffin and Merritt were designated by me to carry into effect the paroling of Lee's troops before they should start for their homes - General Lee leaving Generals Longstreet, Gordon and Pendleton for them to confer with in order to facilitate this work. Lee and I then separated as cordially as we had met, he returning to his own lines, and all went into bivouac for the night at Appomattox.

Soon after Lee's departure I telegraphed to Washington as follows:

HEADQUARTERS APPOMATTOX C. H., VA.,
April 9th, 1865, 4.30 P.M.

HON. E. M. STANTON, SECRETARY OF WAR,

WASHINGTON.

General Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia this afternoon on terms proposed by myself. The accompanying additional correspondence will show the conditions fully.

U. S. GRANT, Lieut.-General.

When the news of the surrender first reached our lines our men commenced firing a salute of a hundred guns in honor of the victory. I at once sent word, however, to have it stopped. The Confederates were now our prisoners, and we did not want to exult over their downfall.

I determined to return to Washington at once, with a view to putting a stop to the purchase of supplies, and what I now deemed other useless outlay of money. Before leaving, however, I thought I would like to see General Lee again; so next morning I rode out beyond our lines towards his headquarters, preceded by a bugler and a staff-officer carrying a white flag.

Lee soon mounted his horse, seeing who it was, and met me. We had there between the lines, sitting on horseback, a very pleasant conversation of over half an hour, in the course of which Lee said to me that the South was a big country, and that we might have to march over it three or four times before the war entirely ended, but that we would now be able to do it as they could no longer resist us. He expressed it as his earnest hope, however, that we would not be called upon to cause more loss and sacrifice of life; but he could not foretell the result. I then suggested to General Lee that there was not a man in the Confederacy whose influence with the soldiery and the whole people was as great as his, and that if he would now advise the surrender of all the armies I had no doubt his advice would be followed with alacrity. But Lee said,.that he could not do that without consulting the President first. I knew there was no use to urge him to do anything against his ideas of what was right.

I was accompanied by my staff and other officers, some of whom seemed to have a great desire to go inside the Confederate lines. They finally asked permission of Lee to do so for the purpose of seeing some of their old army friends, and the permission was granted. They went over, had a very pleasant time with their old friends, and brought some of them back with them when they returned.

When Lee and I separated he went back to his lines and I returned to the house of Mr. McLean. Here the officers of both armies came in great numbers, and seemed to enjoy the meeting as much as though they had been friends separated for a long time

while fighting battles under the same flag. For the time being it looked very much as if all thought of the war had escaped their minds. After an hour pleasantly passed in this way I set out on horseback, accompanied by my staff and a small escort, for Burkesville Junction, up to which point the railroad had by this time been repaired.

[From Personal Memoirs, vol. ii, chapter 67. Reprinted by permission of The Century Company.]'

GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS

[George William Curtis was born in Providence, R.I., Feb. 24, 1824. He was sent to school at Jamaica Plain, near Boston, but had afterwards no academic training. In 1839 his family removed to New York, where he lived till 1842. He early satisfied a wish he had for a simple, useful life by working on a farm in New England, and he was for some time a member of the famous Brook Farm Community. In 1846 he went abroad, and travelled in Europe and the East for three or four years, returning home in 1850. Two years later he became the editor of Putnam's Magazine, and on giving up that periodical he took the department of the Easy Chair in Harper's Monthly, which he continued to write till the time of his death. He entered public life in 1855, and became known throughout the country as a political writer and speaker; he was already active and popular as a lecturer. He refused several places of honor abroad, but accepted from Grant the appointment of Chairman of the Civil Service Commission, which owed to him its first efficiency in the course of political reform. Up to the time of Blaine's nomination for the presidency he was a republican; but after that, though he supported Garfield, he was independent of party ties. He died at West New Brighton, Staten Island, Aug. 31, 1892.

The following are the names and dates of Curtis's principal works: Nile Notes of a Howadji (1851), The Howadji in Syria (1852), The Potiphar Papers (1853), Prue and I (1856), Trumps (1861), Eulogy on Wendell Phillips (1884), three series of essays From the Easy Chair (1892, 1893, 1894), and James Russell Lowell (1892). His Orations and Addresses, edited by Charles Eliot Norton, appeared in 1893-94. His biography has been written by Edward Cary (1895).]

WHEN time shall have got him in the right perspective, few of our writers will show as distinct and continuous a purpose, as direct a growth from a very definite impulse, as George William Curtis. The impulse seemed to exhaust itself at a certain moment of his career, but perhaps it was only included and carried forward in the larger and stronger impulse which made the witness of the effect forget the aesthetic quality in the ethical tendency. His intellectual life was really of a singular unity. The moral force which