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I have in mind a common tenement residence in a crowded and sometimes stifling street in this vicinity, where at evening the hand-organs play and the children run the thoroughfare by thousands. Poor, compact; rich only in those quickly withering flowers of flesh and blood, the boys and girls of the city. It is a section from which most men would flee when in search of rest and quiet. The carts and wagons are numerous, the people are hard-working and poor. Stale odors emanate from many hallways and open windows.

Yet here, winter and summer, when evening falls and the cares of his contracting business are over for the day, this individual may be seen perched upon the front stoop of his particular tenement building or making a slow, conversational progress to the clubhouse, a half-dozen doors to the west. So peculiar is the political life of the great metropolis that his path for this short distance is blockaded by dozens who seek the awesome confessional of his ear.

“Mr. Powers, if you don’t mind, when you’re through I would like a word with you.”