Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant — Volume 1 by Ulysses S. (Ulysses Simpson) Grant
page 26 of 399 (06%)
condition to enjoy myself quite as well as on the former occasion. For
six months before graduation I had had a desperate cough ("Tyler's grip"
it was called), and I was very much reduced, weighing but one hundred
and seventeen pounds, just my weight at entrance, though I had grown six
inches in stature in the mean time. There was consumption in my
father's family, two of his brothers having died of that disease, which
made my symptoms more alarming. The brother and sister next younger
than myself died, during the rebellion, of the same disease, and I
seemed the most promising subject for it of the three in 1843.

Having made alternate choice of two different arms of service with
different uniforms, I could not get a uniform suit until notified of my
assignment. I left my measurement with a tailor, with directions not to
make the uniform until I notified him whether it was to be for infantry
or dragoons. Notice did not reach me for several weeks, and then it
took at least a week to get the letter of instructions to the tailor and
two more to make the clothes and have them sent to me. This was a time
of great suspense. I was impatient to get on my uniform and see how it
looked, and probably wanted my old school-mates, particularly the girls,
to see me in it.

The conceit was knocked out of me by two little circumstances that
happened soon after the arrival of the clothes, which gave me a distaste
for military uniform that I never recovered from. Soon after the
arrival of the suit I donned it, and put off for Cincinnati on
horseback. While I was riding along a street of that city, imagining
that every one was looking at me, with a feeling akin to mine when I
first saw General Scott, a little urchin, bareheaded, footed, with dirty
and ragged pants held up by bare a single gallows--that's what
suspenders were called then--and a shirt that had not seen a wash-tub
DigitalOcean Referral Badge