His own salary was only
fifteen hundred dollars; and though his brother-in-law, Senator
Rainsford, tried his best to get the amount raised, he was
unsuccessful. The consulship to Opeki was instituted early in the
'50's, to get rid of and reward a third or fourth cousin of the
President's, whose services during the campaign were important, but
whose after-presence was embarrassing. He had been created consul to
Opeki as being more distant and unaccessible than any other known
spot, and had lived and died there; and so little was known of the
island, and so difficult was communication with it, that no one knew
he was dead, until Captain Travis, in his hungry haste for office, had
uprooted the sad fact. Captain Travis, as well as Albert, had a
secondary reason for wishing to visit Opeki. His physician had told
him to go to some warm climate for his rheumatism, and in accepting
the consulship his object was rather to follow out his doctor's orders
at his country's expense, than to serve his country at the expense of
his rheumatism.
Albert could learn but very little of Opeki; nothing, indeed, but that
it was situated about one hundred miles from the Island of Octavia,
which island, in turn, was simply described as a coaling-station three
hundred miles distant from the coast of California. Steamers from San
Francisco to Yokohama stopped every third week at Octavia, and that
was all that either Captain Travis or his secretary could learn of
their new home.
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