Page:The Presidents of the United States, 1789-1914, v. III.djvu/127

 ULYSSES SIMPSON GRANT 99 while his summers were passed at his cottage at Long Branch. On Christmas eve, 1883, he slipped and fell upon the icy sidewalk in front of his house, and received an injury to his hip, which proved so severe that he never afterward walked without the aid of a crutch. Finding himself unable with his income to support his family properly, he had be come a partner in a banking-house in which one of his sons and others were interested, bearing the name of Grant and Ward, and invested all his available capital in the business. He took no part in the management, and the affairs of the firm were left almost entirely in the hands of the junior partner. In May, 1884, the firm without warning suspended. It was found that two of the partners had been practising a series of unblushing frauds, and had robbed the general and his family of all they possessed, and left them hopelessly bankrupt. Until this time he had refused all solicitations to write the history of his military career for publica tion, intending to leave it to the official records and the historians of the war. Almost his only contri bution to literature was an article entitled &quot;An Un deserved Stigma,&quot; in the &quot;North American Re view&quot; for December, 1882, which he wrote as an act of justice to Gen. Fitz- John Porter, whose case he had personally investigated. But now he was approached by the conductors of the &quot;Century&quot; magazine with an invitation to write a series of