into my
mind, to discover which of its poor properties were gone, and what degree of
detriment had already accrued to the remainder. I endeavoured to calculate how
much longer I could stay in the Custom-House, and yet go forth a man. To confess
the truth, it was my greatest apprehension, - as it would never be a measure of
policy to turn out so quiet an individual as myself, and it being hardly in the
nature of a public officer to resign, - it was my chief trouble, therefore, that
I was likely to grow gray and decrepit in the Surveyor-ship, and become much
such another animal as the old Inspector. Might it not, in the tedious lapse of
official life that lay before me, finally be with me as it was with this
venerable friend, - to make the dinner-hour the nucleus of the day, and to spend
the rest of it, as an old dog spends it, asleep in the sunshine or the shade? A
dreary look-forward this, for a man who felt it to be the best definition of
happiness to live throughout the whole range of his faculties and sensibilities!
But, all this while, I was giving myself very unnecessary alarm. Providence had
meditated better things for me than I could possibly imagine for myself.
    A remarkable event of the third year of my Surveyorship - to adopt the tone
of P. P. - was the election of General Taylor to the Presidency. It is
essential, in order to form a complete estimate of the advantages of official
life, to view the incumbent at the in-coming of a hostile administration. His
position is then one of the most singularly irksome, and, in every contingency,
disagreeable, that a wretched mortal can possibly occupy; with seldom an
alternative of good, on either hand, although what presents itself to him as the
worst event may very probably be the best. But it is a strange experience, to a
man of pride and sensibility, to know that his interests are within the control
of individuals who neither love nor understand him, and by whom, since one or
the other must needs happen, he would rather be injured than obliged. Strange,
too, for one who has kept his calmness throughout the contest, to observe the
bloodthirstiness that is developed in the hour of triumph, and to be conscious
that he is himself among its objects! There are few uglier traits of human
nature than this tendency-which I now witnessed in men no worse than their
neighbours - to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the power