General Horace Porter, Campaigning with Grant

[418] together after a vacation than the meeting of the chief actors in a great war tragedy. Sherman walked up with the general-in-chief to headquarters, where Mrs. Grant extended to the illustrious visitor a cordial greeting. Sherman then seated himself with the others by the camp-fire, and gave a most graphic description of the stirring events of his march through Georgia. The story was the more charming from the fact that it was related without the manifestation of the slightest egotism. His field of operations had covered more than half of the entire theater of war; his orders always spoke with the true bluntness of the soldier; he had fought from valley depths to mountain heights, and marched from inland rivers to the sea. Never were listeners more enthusiastic; never was a speaker more eloquent. The story, told as he alone could tell it, was a grand epic related with Homeric power. At times he became humorous, and in a nervous, offhand, rattling manner recounted a number of amusing incidents of the famous march. He said, among other things: “My old veterans got on pretty familiar terms with me on the march, and often used to keep up a running conversation with me as I rode along by their side. One day a man in the ranks had pulled off his shoes and stockings, and rolled up his trousers as far as they would go, to wade across a creek we had struck. I could n't help admiring his magnificently developed limbs, which might have served as models for a sculptor, and I called out to him: ‘A good stout pair of legs you've got there, my man.’ ‘Yes, general; they're not bad underpinning,’ he replied, looking down at them with evident pride. ‘I would n't mind exchanging mine for them, if you don't object,’ I continued. He sized up my legs with his eye, and evidently considered them mere spindle-shanks compared with his, and then looked up at me and said: ”