These inveterate ones, who would be now as my hand in gathering together that wealth which I anticipated, were known in circles wherein they moved and had their dingy being, as Sing Sing Jacob, Puffy the Merchant, and Paddy the Priest. Paddy the Priest wore a look of sanctity, and it was this impression of holiness to confer upon him his title. It might have been more consistent with those virtues of rapine dominant of his nature, had he been hailed Paddy the Pirate, instead. Of Sing Sing Jacob, I should say, that he had not served in prison. His name was given him because, while he was never granted the privilege of stripes and irons, he often earned the same. In what manner or at what font Puffy the Merchant received baptism, I never learned. That he came fit for my purpose would find sufficient indication in a complaining compliment which Paddy the Priest once paid him, and who said in description of Puffy's devious genius, that if one were to drive a nail through his head it would come forth a corkscrew. These men were to be my personal lieutenants, and collect my gold for me. And since they would pillage me with as scanty a scruple as though I were the foe himself, I must hit upon a device for invoking them to honesty in ny affairs. It was then I remembered the parting words of Big Kennedy. I would set one against the others; hating each other, they would watch; and each would be sharp with warning in my ear should either of his fellows seek to fill a purse at my expense. To sow discord among my three offered no difficulties; I had but to say to one what the others told of him, and his ire was on permanent end. It was thus I separated them; and since I gave each his special domain of effort, while they worked near enough to one another to maintain a watch, they were not so thrown together as to bring down among them open war. It will be required that I set forth in half-detail those various municipal fields and meadows that I laid out in my time, and from which the machine was to garner its harvest. You will note then, you who are innocent of politics in its practical expressions and rewards, how the town stood to me as does his plowlands to a farmer, and offered as various a list of crops to careful tillage. Take for example the knee-deep clover of the tax department. Each year there was made a whole valuation of personal property of say roundly nine billions of dollars. This estimate, within a dozen weeks of its making, would be reduced to fewer than one billion, on the word of individuals who made the law-required oaths. No, it need not have been so reduced; but the reduction ever occurred since the machine instructed its tax officers to act on the oath so furnished, and that without question.