But I had done the state some service, and I sent in my bill: 

     The United States of America in account with
     the Hon. Clerk of the Senate Committee on Conchology, Dr.
          To consultation with Secretary of War ............ $50
          To consultation with Secretary of Navy ........... $50
          To consultation with Secretary of the Treasury ... $50
          Cabinet consultation ...................No charge. 
          To mileage to and from Jerusalem, via Egypt,
               Algiers, Gibraltar, and Cadiz,
               14,000 miles, at 20c. a mile ............. $2,800
          To salary as Clerk of Senate Committee
          on Conchology, six days, at $6 per day ........... $36

Total .......................... $2,986

—­[Territorial delegates charge mileage both ways, although they never go back when they get here once.  Why my mileage is denied me is more than I can understand.]

Not an item of this bill has been paid, except that trifle of thirty-six dollars for clerkship salary.  The Secretary of the Treasury, pursuing me to the last, drew his pen through all the other items, and simply marked in the margin “Not allowed.”  So, the dread alternative is embraced at last.  Repudiation has begun!  The nation is lost.

I am done with official life for the present.  Let those clerks who are willing to be imposed on remain.  I know numbers of them in the departments who are never informed when there is to be a Cabinet meeting, whose advice is never asked about war, or finance, or commerce, by the heads of the nation, any more than if they were not connected with the government, and who actually stay in their offices day after day and work!  They know their importance to the nation, and they unconsciously show it in their bearing, and the way they order their sustenance at the restaurant—­but they work.  I know one who has to paste all sorts of little scraps from the newspapers into a scrapbook—­sometimes as many as eight or ten scraps a day.  He doesn’t do it well, but he does it as well as he can.  It is very fatiguing.  It is exhausting to the intellect.  Yet he only gets eighteen hundred dollars a year.  With a brain like his, that young man could amass thousands and thousands of dollars in some other pursuit, if he chose to do it.  But no—­his heart is with his country, and he will serve her as long as she has got a scrapbook left.  And I know clerks that don’t know how to write very well, but such knowledge as they possess they nobly lay at the feet of their country, and toil on and suffer for twenty-five hundred dollars a year.  What they write has to be written over again by other clerks sometimes; but when a man has done his best for his country, should his country complain?  Then there are clerks that have no clerkships, and are waiting, and waiting, and waiting for a vacancy—­waiting patiently for a chance to help their country out—­and