There is a strong assumption in the upper walks of life that there is nothing to be learned at the bottom.

If you could have looked into the capacious but balanced temperament of John J.McKenty you would have seen a strange wisdom there and stranger memories--whole worlds of brutalities, tendernesses, errors, immoralities suffered, endured, even rejoiced in--the hardy, eager life of the animal that has nothing but its perceptions, instincts, appetites to guide it.

Yet the man had the air and the poise of a gentleman.
To-day, at forty-eight, McKenty was an exceedingly important personage.
His roomy house on the West Side, at Harrison Street and Ashland Avenue, was visited at sundry times by financiers, business men, office-holders, priests, saloon-keepers--in short, the whole range and gamut of active, subtle, political life.

From McKenty they could obtain that counsel, wisdom, surety, solution which all of them on occasion were anxious to have, and which in one deft way and another--often by no more than gratitude and an acknowledgment of his leadership--they were willing to pay for.

To police captains and officers whose places he occasionally saved, when they should justly have been discharged; to mothers whose erring boys or girls he took out of prison and sent home again; to keepers of bawdy houses whom he protected from a too harsh invasion of the grafting propensities of the local police; to politicians and saloon-keepers who were in danger of being destroyed by public upheavals of one kind and another, he seemed, in hours of stress, when his smooth, genial, almost artistic face beamed on them, like a heaven-sent son of light, a kind of Western god, all-powerful, all-merciful, perfect.