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 warehouse, a plainer and uglier
structure than ever was built in America. On the walls of the room hung
a large map of the United States (as they were, twenty years ago, but