“Why then,” said he, “and seeing that you will have no other way for it, you may command my services. Really, I shall be proud to introduce you, don't y' know, as one who, missing being a monkey by birth, is now determined to become one by naturalization. Now I should say that a way to begin would be to discover a dinner and have you there as a guest. I know a society queen who will jump at the chance; she will have you at her chariot wheel like another Caractacus in another Rome, and parade you as a latest captive to her social bow and spear. I'll tell her; it will offer an excellent occasion for you to declare your intentions and take out your first papers in that Apeland whereof you seem so strenuous to become a citizen.” While the work put upon me by my place as Boss had never an end, but filled both my day and my night to overflowing, it brought with it compensation. If I were ground and worn away on the wheel of my position like a knife on a grindstone, still I was kept to keenest edge, and I felt that joy I've sometimes thought a good blade must taste in the sheer fact of its trenchant quality. Besides, there would now and then arrive a moment which taught me how roundly I had conquered, and touched me with that sense of power which offers the highest pleasure whereof the soul of man is capable. Here would be an example of what I mean, although I cannot believe the thing could happen in any country save America or any city other than New York. It was one evening at my own door, when that judge who once sought to fix upon me the murder of Jimmy the Blacksmith, came tapping for an interview. His term was bending towards the evening of its close, and the mean purpose of him was none better-than to just plead for his place again. I will not say the man was abject; but then the thought of his mission, added to a memory of that relation to each other in which it was aforetime our one day's fate to have stood, choked me with contempt. I shall let his conduct go by without further characterization; and yet for myself, had our fortunes been reversed and he the Boss and I the Judge, before I had been discovered in an attitude of office-begging from a hand I once plotted to kill, I would have died against the wall. But so it was; my visitor would labor with me for a renomination. My first impulse was one of destruction; I would put him beneath the wheel and crush out the breath of his hopes. And then came Big Kennedy's warning to avoid revenge when moved of nothing broader than a reason of revenge.