Consular Experiences

The Consulate of the United States, in my day, was located in Washington
Buildings (a shabby and smoke-stained edifice of four stories high, thus
illustriously named in honor of our national establishment), at the lower
corner of Brunswick Street, contiguous to the Gorec Arcade, and in the
neighborhood of scone of the oldest docks. This was by no means a polite
or elegant portion of England's great commercial city, nor were the
apartments of the American official so splendid as to indicate the
assumption of much consular pomp on his part. A narrow and ill-lighted
staircase gave access to an equally narrow and ill-lighted passageway on
the first floor, at the extremity of which, surmounting a door-frame,
appeared an exceedingly stiff pictorial representation of the Goose and
Gridiron, according to the English idea of those ever-to-be-honored
symbols. The staircase and passageway were often thronged, of a morning,
with a set of beggarly and piratical-looking scoundrels (I do no wrong to
our own countrymen in styling them so, for not one in twenty was a
genuine American), purporting to belong to our mercantile marine, and
chiefly composed of Liverpool Blackballers and the scum of every maritime
nation on earth; such being the seamen by whose assistance we then
disputed the navigation of the world with England. These specimens of a
most unfortunate class of people were shipwrecked crews in quest of bed,
board, and clothing, invalids asking permits for the hospital, bruised
and bloody wretches complaining of ill-treatment by their officers,
drunkards, desperadoes, vagabonds, and cheats, perplexingly intermingled
with an uncertain proportion of reasonably honest men. All of them (save
here and there a poor devil of a kidnapped landsman in his shoregoing
rags) wore red flannel shirts, in which they had sweltered or shivered
throughout the voyage, and all required consular assistance in one form
or another.

Any respectable visitor, if he could make up his mind to elbow a passage
among these sea-monsters, was admitted into an outer office, where he
found more of the same species, explaining their respective wants or
grievances to the Vice-Consul and clerks, while their shipmates awaited
their turn outside the door. Passing through this exterior court, the
stranger was ushered into an inner privacy, where sat the Consul himself,
ready to give personal attention to such peculiarly difficult and more
important cases as might demand the exercise of (what we will courteously
suppose to be) his own higher judicial or administrative sagacity.

It was an apartment of very moderate size, painted in imitation of oak,
and duskily lighted by two windows looking across a by-street at the
rough brick-side of an immense cotton