I was then
on my way to be consul at Venice, where I spent the next four years in a
vigilance for Confederate privateers which none of them ever surprised.
I had asked for the consulate at Munich, where I hoped to steep myself
yet longer in German poetry, but when my appointment came, I found it was
for Rome. I was very glad to get Rome even; but the income of the office
was in fees, and I thought I had better go on to Washington and find out
how much the fees amounted to. People in Columbus who had been abroad
said that on five hundred dollars you could live in Rome like a prince,
but I doubted this; and when I learned at the State Department that the
fees of the Roman consulate came to only three hundred, I perceived that
I could not live better than a baron, probably, and I despaired. The
kindly chief of the consular bureau said that the President's
secretaries, Mr. John Nicolay and Mr. John Hay, were interested in my
appointment, and he advised my going over to the White House and seeing
them. I lost no time in doing that, and I learned that as young Western
men they were interested in me because I was a young Western man who had
done something in literature, and they were willing to help me for that
reason, and for no other that I ever knew. They proposed my going to
Venice; the salary was then seven hundred and fifty, but they thought
they could get it put up to a thousand. In the end they got it put up to
fifteen hundred, and so I went to Venice, where if I did not live like a
prince on that income, I lived a good deal more like a prince than I
could have done at Rome on a fifth of it.

If the appointment was not present fortune, it was the beginning of the
best luck I have had in the world, and I am glad to owe it all to those
friends of my verse, who could have been no otherwise friends of me. They
were then beginning very early careers of distinction which have not been
wholly divided. Mr. Nicolay could have been about twenty-five, and Mr.
Hay nineteen or twenty. No one dreamed as yet of the opportunity opening
to them in being so constantly near the man whose life they have written,
and with whose fame they have imperishably interwrought their names. I
remember the sobered dignity of the one, and the humorous gaiety of the
other, and how we had some young men's joking and laughing together, in
the anteroom where they received me, with the great soul entering upon
its travail beyond the closed door. They asked