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 pass.  All I wish to know is, is this a Cabinet meeting or is it not?”

The President said it was.

“Then,” I said, “let us proceed to business at once, and not fritter away valuable time in unbecoming fault-findings with each other’s official conduct.”

The Secretary of State now spoke up, in his benignant way, and said, “Young man, you are laboring under a mistake.  The clerks of the Congressional committees are not members of the Cabinet.  Neither are the doorkeepers of the Capitol, strange as it may seem.  Therefore, much as we could desire your more than human wisdom in our deliberations, we cannot lawfully avail ourselves of it.  The counsels of the nation must proceed without you; if disaster follows, as follow full well it may, be it balm to your sorrowing spirit that by deed and voice you did what in you lay to avert it.  You have my blessing.  Farewell.”

These gentle words soothed my troubled breast, and I went away.  But the servants of a nation can know no peace.  I had hardly reached my den in the Capitol, and disposed my feet on the table like a representative, when one of the Senators on the Conchological Committee came in in a passion and said: 

“Where have you been all day?”

I observed that, if that was anybody’s affair but my own, I had been to a Cabinet meeting.

“To a Cabinet meeting?  I would like to know what business you had at a Cabinet meeting?”

I said I went there to consult—­allowing for the sake of argument that he was in any wise concerned in the matter.  He grew insolent then, and ended by saying he had wanted me for three days past to copy a report on bomb-shells, egg-shells, clamshells, and I don’t know what all, connected with conchology, and nobody had been able to find me.

This was too much.  This was the feather that broke the clerical camel’s back.  I said, “Sir, do you suppose that I am going to work for six dollars a day?  If that is the idea, let me recommend the Senate Committee on Conchology to hire somebody else.  I am the slave of no faction!  Take back your degrading commission.  Give me liberty, or give me death!”

From that hour I was no longer connected with the government.  Snubbed by the department, snubbed by the Cabinet, snubbed at last by the chairman of a committee I was endeavoring to adorn, I yielded to persecution, cast far from me the perils and seductions of my great office, and forsook my bleeding country in the hour of her peril.