salary was to be five hundred dollars a year.  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.  This was so very little, that Albert stipulated to stay only as long as he liked it, and to return to the States within a few months if he found such a change of plan desirable.

As he was going to what was an almost undiscovered country, he thought it would be advisable to furnish himself with a supply of articles with which he might trade with the native Opekians, and for this purpose he purchased a large quantity of brass rods, because he had read that Stanley did so, and added to these brass curtain-chains, and about two hundred leaden medals similar to those sold by street peddlers during the Constitutional Centennial Celebration in New York City.

He also collected even more beautiful but less expensive decorations for Christmas-trees, at a wholesale house on Park Row.  These he hoped to exchange for furs or feathers or weapons, or for whatever other curious and valuable trophies the Island of Opeki boasted.  He already pictured his rooms on his return hung fantastically with crossed spears and boomerangs, feather head-dresses, and ugly idols.

His friends told him that he was doing a very foolish thing, and argued that once out of the newspaper world, it would be hard to regain his place in it.  But he thought the novel that he would write while lost to the world at Opeki would serve to make up for his temporary absence from it, and he expressly and impressively stipulated that the editor should wire him if there was a war.