The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Consul, by Richard Harding Davis

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Title: The Consul

Author: Richard Harding Davis

Posting Date: November 17, 2008 [EBook #1762]
Release Date: May, 1999

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CONSUL ***

Produced by Aaron Cannon

THE CONSUL

By Richard Harding Davis

For over forty years, in one part of the world or another, old man
Marshall had, served his country as a United States consul. He had
been appointed by Lincoln. For a quarter of a century that fact was his
distinction. It was now his epitaph. But in former years, as each new
administration succeeded the old, it had again and again saved his
official head. When victorious and voracious place-hunters, searching
the map of the world for spoils, dug out his hiding-place and demanded
his consular sign as a reward for a younger and more aggressive party
worker, the ghost of the dead President protected him. In the State
Department, Marshall had become a tradition. "You can't touch Him!"
the State Department would say; "why, HE was appointed by Lincoln!"
Secretly, for this weapon against the hungry headhunters, the department
was infinitely grateful. Old man Marshall was a consul after its own
heart. Like a soldier, he was obedient, disciplined; wherever he was
sent, there, without question, he would go. Never against exile, against
ill-health, against climate did he make complaint. Nor when he was moved
on and down to make way for some ne'er-do-well with influence, with a
brother-in-law in the Senate, with a cousin owning a newspaper, with
rich relatives who desired him to drink himself to death at the expense
of the government rather than at their own, did old man Marshall point
to his record as a claim for more just treatment.

And it had been an excellent record. His official reports, in a quaint,
stately hand, were models of English; full of information, intelligent,
valuable, well observed. And those few of his countrymen, who stumbled
upon him in the out-of-the-world places to which of late he had been
banished, wrote of him to the department in terms of admiration and awe.
Never had