This is a didactic or illustrative story, with a moral we find thus laid down on the last page: "Our government sends men abroad who, after hard labor and long experience, learn a complicated, delicate and responsible profession; and no sooner have they learned it, and are able to perform creditably to themselves and the government they represent all its intricate duties, than they are recalled and replaced by inexperienced men, who have to go through the same ordeal, and never stay long enough to be of real service to their country." The gentleman upon whose shadowy shoulders is placed the heavy task of pointing this dictum is Samuel Sampleton, Esq., teacher of a private seminary on Cape Cod, who gets tired of the young idea and seeks more profitable and expanded fields of labor. He has not, at the outset, the slightest preparation for the duties of the position--that of United States consul at Verdecuerno (a translation of Palermo into "Greenhorn")--or even knowledge of what they are. His utter lack of information in the premises is indeed quite exceptional, especially in a New England teacher. We should have expected an average lad of fourteen in any part of the Union to have suspected that a consul would need some acquaintance with the language of the people among whom he was stationed, if not some slight notion of the general routine and purposes of the office. Mr. Sampleton, however, is not lacking in shrewdness and energy, and sets to work manfully, despite the difficulties of his situation, general and special. After several trying years, the comical tribulations of which are graphically set forth, he is just beginning to feel himself at home when he is summarily placed there in another sense by recall. He comes back as poor as he went, save in experience and the languages, and resumes the ferule with the determination not again to abandon it for the pen of the public employe.