sphered content of life; not crystalline, perhaps, and yet not
utterly dark--an agate temperament, cloudy and strange. As a
three-year-old child McKenty had been brought from Ireland by his
emigrant parents during a period of famine. He had been raised
on the far South Side in a shanty which stood near a maze of
railroad-tracks, and as a naked baby he had crawled on its earthen
floor. His father had been promoted to a section boss after working
for years as a day-laborer on the adjoining railroad, and John,
junior, one of eight other children, had been sent out early to
do many things--to be an errand-boy in a store, a messenger-boy
for a telegraph company, an emergency sweep about a saloon, and
finally a bartender. This last was his true beginning, for he
was discovered by a keen-minded politician and encouraged to run
for the state legislature and to study law. Even as a stripling
what things had he not learned--robbery, ballot-box stuffing, the
sale of votes, the appointive power of leaders, graft, nepotism,
vice exploitation--all the things that go to make up (or did) the
American world of politics and financial and social strife. There
is a strong assumption in the upper walks of life that there is
nothing to be learned at the bottom. If you could have looked
into the capacious but balanced temperament of John J. McKenty you
would have seen a strange wisdom there and stranger memories--whole
worlds of brutalities, tendernesses, errors, immoralities suffered,
endured, even rejoiced in--the hardy, eager life of the animal
that has nothing but its perceptions, instincts, appetites to guide
it. Yet the man had the air and the poise of a gentleman.

To-day, at forty-eight, McKenty was an exceedingly important
personage. His roomy house on the West Side, at Harrison Street
and Ashland Avenue, was visited at sundry times by financiers,