And yet I have thought folk mistaken in Big Kennedy. For all his loud openness and friendly roar, which would seem to tell his every thought, the man could be the soul of cunning and turn secret as a mole. He was for his own interest; he came and went a cold calculating trader of politics; he never wasted his favors, but must get as much as he gave, and indulged in no revenges except when revenge was needed for a lesson. He did what men call good, too, and spent money and lost sleep in its accomplishment. To the ill he sent doctors and drugs; he found work and wages for idle men; he paid landlords and kept the roofs above the heads of the penniless; where folk were hungry he sent food, and where they were cold came fuel. For all that, it was neither humanity nor any milk of kindness which put him to these labors of grace; it was but his method of politics and meant to bind men to him. They must do his word; they must carry out his will; then it was he took them beneath the wing of his power and would spare neither time nor money to protect and prosper them. And on the other side, he who raised his head in opposition to Big Kennedy was crushed; not in anger, but in caution. He weeded out rebellion, and the very seed of it, with as little scruple and for the same reason a farmer weeds a field. It took me years to collect these truths of Big Kennedy. Nor was their arrival when they did come one by one, to make a shade of change in my regard for him. I liked him in the beginning; I liked him in the end; he became that headland on the coasts of politics by which I steered my course. I studied Big Kennedy as one might study a science; by the lines of his conduct I laid down lines for my own; in all things I was his disciple and his imitator. Big Kennedy is dead now; and I will say no worse nor better of him than this: He was a natural captain of men. Had he been born to a higher station, he might have lighted a wick in history that would require those ten thicknesses of darkness which belong with ten centuries, to obscure. But no such thing could come in the instance of Big Kennedy; his possibilities of eminence, like my own, were confined to Tammany and its politics, since he had no more of education than have I. The time has gone by in the world at large, and had in Big Kennedy's day, when the ignorant man can be the first man. Upon the day following my release, as he had bid me.