within a month after the exterminating angel had come up the
Custom-House steps. According to the received code in such
matters, it would have been nothing short of duty, in a
politician, to bring every one of those white heads under the
axe of the guillotine. It was plain enough to discern that the
old fellows dreaded some such discourtesy at my hands. It
pained, and at the same time amused me, to behold the terrors
that attended my advent, to see a furrowed cheek, weather-beaten
by half a century of storm, turn ashy pale at the glance of so
harmless an individual as myself; to detect, as one or another
addressed me, the tremor of a voice which, in long-past days,
had been wont to bellow through a speaking-trumpet, hoarsely
enough to frighten Boreas himself to silence. They knew, these
excellent old persons, that, by all established rule--and, as
regarded some of them, weighed by their own lack of efficiency
for business--they ought to have given place to younger men,
more orthodox in politics, and altogether fitter than themselves
to serve our common Uncle. I knew it, too, but could never quite
find in my heart to act upon the knowledge. Much and deservedly
to my own discredit, therefore, and considerably to the
detriment of my official conscience, they continued, during my
incumbency, to creep about the wharves, and loiter up and down
the Custom-House steps. They spent a good deal of time, also,
asleep in their accustomed corners, with their chairs tilted
back against the walls; awaking, however, once or twice in the
forenoon, to bore one another with the several thousandth
repetition of old sea-stories and mouldy jokes, that had grown
to be passwords and countersigns among them.

The discovery was soon made, I imagine, that the new Surveyor