In Caracas, Thomas Strawbridge called at the American Consulate, from a sense of duty. The consul, a weary, tropic-shot politician from Kentucky, received him with gin, cigars, and a jaded enthusiasm. He glanced at Mr. Strawbridge's business card and inquired if his visitor were one of the Strawbridges of Virginia. The young man replied that he lived in Keokuk, Iowa, and that his father had moved there from somewhere East. Upon this statement the consul ventured the dictum that if any family didn't know they had come from Virginia, they hadn't. Having exhausted their native states as a topic of conversation, they swung around, in their talk, to the relatively unimportant Venezuela which swe…
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