my
hat and go, if I could not be treated with the respect due to my office,
and I did go. It was just like a new author. They always think they
know more than anybody else when they are getting out their first book.
Nobody can tell them anything.

During the whole time that I was connected with the government it seemed
as if I could not do anything in an official capacity without getting
myself into trouble. And yet I did nothing, attempted nothing, but what
I conceived to be for the good of my country. The sting of my wrongs may
have driven me to unjust and harmful conclusions, but it surely seemed to
me that the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, the Secretary of
the Treasury, and others of my confreres had conspired from the very
beginning to drive me from the Administration. I never attended but one
Cabinet meeting while I was connected with the government. That was
sufficient for me. The servant at the White House door did not seem
disposed to make way for me until I asked if the other members of the
Cabinet had arrived. He said they had, and I entered. They were all
there; but nobody offered me a seat. They stared at me as if I had been
an intruder. The President said:

"Well, sir, who are you?"

I handed him my card, and he read: "The HON. MARK TWAIN, Clerk of the
Senate Committee on Conchology." Then he looked at me from head to foot,
as if he had never heard of me before. The Secretary of the Treasury
said:

"This is the meddlesome ass that came to recommend me to put poetry and
conundrums in my report, as if it were an almanac."

The Secretary of War said: "It is the same visionary that came to me
yesterday with a scheme to educate a portion of the Indians to death,
and massacre the balance."

The Secretary of the Navy said: "I recognize this youth as the person who
has been interfering with my business time and again during the week. He
is distressed about Admiral Farragut's using a whole fleet for a pleasure
excursion, as he terms it. His proposition about some insane pleasure
excursion on a raft is too absurd to repeat."

I said: "Gentlemen, I perceive here a disposition to throw discredit
upon every act of my official career; I perceive, also, a disposition to
debar me from all voice in the counsels of the nation. No notice
whatever was sent to me to-day. It was only by the merest chance that I
learned that there was going to be a Cabinet meeting. But let these
things pa