Roger Fauquier had
been a departmental clerk for forty years. It was at once his practical
good luck and his misfortune to have been early appointed to a position
which required a thorough and complete knowledge of the formulas and
routine of a department that expended millions of the public funds.
Fauquier, on a poor salary, diminishing instead of increasing with his
service, had seen successive administrations bud and blossom and decay,
but had kept his position through the fact that his knowledge was a
necessity to the successive chiefs and employes. Once it was true that
he had been summarily removed by a new Secretary, to make room for a
camp follower, whose exhaustive and intellectual services in a political
campaign had made him eminently fit for anything; but the alarming
discovery that the new clerk's knowledge of grammar and etymology
was even worse than that of the Secretary himself, and that, through
ignorance of detail, the business of that department was retarded to a
damage to the Government of over half a million of dollars, led to the
reinstatement of Mr.
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