While I thus lay aside for the moment the running history of events that were as the stepping stones by which I crossed from obscurity and poverty to power and wealth, to have a glance at myself in my more personal attitudes, I should also relate my marriage and how I took a wife. It was Anne who had charge of the business, and brought me this soft victory. Had it not been for Anne, I more than half believe I would have had no wife at all; for I was eaten of an uneasy awkwardness whenever my fate delivered me into the presence of a girl. However earnestly Anne might counsel, I had no more of parlor wisdom than a savage, Anne, while sighing over my crudities and the hopeless thickness of my wits, established herself as a bearward to supervise my conduct. She picked out my wife for me, and in days when I should have been a lover, but was a graven image and as stolid, carried forward the courting in my stead. It was none other than Apple Cheek upon whom Anne pitched--Apple Cheek, grown rounder and more fair, with locks like cornsilk, and eyes of even a deeper blue than on that day of the docks. Anne had struck out a friendship for Apple Cheek from the beginning, and the two were much in one another's company. And so one day, by ways and means I was too much confused to understand, Anne had us before the priest. We were made husband and wife; Apple Cheek brave and sweet, I looking like a fool in need of keepers. Anne, the architect of this bliss, was in tears; and yet she must have kept her head, for I remember how she recalled me to the proprieties of my new station. “Why don't you kiss your bride!” cried Anne, at the heel of the ceremony. Anne snapped out the words, and they rang in my delinquent ears like a storm bell. Apple Cheek, eyes wet to be a match for Anne's, put up her lips with all the courage in the world. I kissed her, much as one might salute a hot flatiron. Still I kissed her; and I think to the satisfaction of a church-full looking on; but I knew what men condemned have felt on that journey to block and ax. Apple Cheek and her choice of me made up the sweetest fortune of my life, and now when I think of her it is as if I stood in a flood of sunshine. So far as I was able, I housed her and robed her as though she were the daughter of a king, and while I have met treason in others and desertion where I looked for loyalty, I held her heart-fast, love-fast, faith-fast, ever my own. She was my treasure, and when she died it was as though my own end had come. Big Kennedy and the then Chief of Tammany, during my earlier years as alderman, were as Jonathan and David. They were ever together, and their plans and their interests ran side by side. At last they began to fall apart. Big Kennedy saw a peril in this too-close a partnership, and was for putting distance between them. It was Old Mike who thus counseled him. The aged one became alarmed by the raw and insolent extravagance of the Chief's methods.