文档介绍：THE CONSUL
The Consul
by Richard Harding Davis
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THE CONSUL
THE CONSUL
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 eeded 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 e 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 plaint. 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 he or his friends petitioned for promotion, until it was at last
apparent that, save for his