text:  In the spring, he was healthy and wealthy. Besides his generous benefactors, he had received enormous Gilded Age profits from his investments with the firm Grant and Ward. So one of the partners was his son, and the other one was a man named Ferdinand Ward. And the profits they had achieved were really astronomical. So Grant was the wealthiest that he ever was in his life at the beginning of 1884. But by the fall, he was not only bankrupt, but he was mortally ill.