Adam Badeau, Grant in peace: from Appomattox to Mount McGregor, a personal memoir

[309] Pass. General Grant, Jesse, and I strolled on after dinner in advance of the vetturino, and the carriage came up to us empty. Mrs. Grant was not within. Her maid was called, and, almost crying, said she had not seen her mistress for nearly a quarter of an hour. We searched and called, but could not find her. The General became anxious, fearful lest she might have fallen over the precipitous sides of the road. But she did not leave us long in doubt. It was a game of hide and seek in the Alps between the Conqueror of Vicksburg and the woman he had wooed and won more than a quarter of a century before.

When we went up from Interlachen to Grindenwald he and Mrs. Grant flirted nearly all the way. They half quarreled as to how they should sit, and wanted always to be by each other's side. Mrs. Grant once changed her seat so as to get a better view of the Wetterhorn; this placed her opposite her husband, and General Grant, who was a grandfather and nearly sixty years old, didn't like it at all. Mrs. Grant perceived this, and coquettishly refused to return till we arrived at a certain point in the valley; and the hero was uncomfortable until Grindenwald was reached, and he could sit by the side of the mother of his grown — up children. Then he was happy again under the snows and the shadows of the Jungfrau. Neither the compliments of palaces nor the plaudits of two continents had lessened his simplicity or his domesticity.

Sometimes, however, he made use of his greatness rather oddly. At a little town in Norway, I think it was Christiana, as soon as he arrived he went out alone to walk, and wandered away till he was lost. He could not speak a word of the language, and found no one who knew any more English than he did Norwegian. His topographical sense, which rarely deserted him, on this occasion was quite at fault; and he was an hour or more trying to find his way. At last he approached an intelligent-looking man of the humbler sort,