Patrick O’Riley (as his name then stood) created friends and influence very, fast, for he was always on hand at the police courts to give straw bail for his customers or establish an alibi for them in case they had been beating anybody to death on his premises.  Consequently he presently became a political leader, and was elected to a petty office under the city government.  Out of a meager salary he soon saved money enough to open quite a stylish liquor saloon higher up town, with a faro bank attached and plenty of capital to conduct it with.  This gave him fame and great respectability.  The position of alderman was forced upon him, and it was just the same as presenting him a gold mine.  He had fine horses and carriages, now, and closed up his whiskey mill.

By and by he became a large contractor for city work, and was a bosom friend of the great and good Wm. M. Weed himself, who had stolen $20,600,000 from the city and was a man so envied, so honored,—­so adored, indeed, that when the sheriff went to his office to arrest him as a felon, that sheriff blushed and apologized, and one of the illustrated papers made a picture of the scene and spoke of the matter in such a way as to show that the editor regretted that the offense of an arrest had been offered to so exalted a personage as Mr. Weed.

Mr. O’Riley furnished shingle nails to, the new Court House at three thousand dollars a keg, and eighteen gross of 60-cent thermometers at fifteen hundred dollars a dozen; the controller and the board of audit passed the bills, and a mayor, who was simply ignorant but not criminal, signed them.  When they were paid, Mr. O’Riley’s admirers gave him a solitaire diamond pin of the size of a filbert, in imitation of the liberality of Mr. Weed’s friends, and then Mr. O’Riley retired from active service and amused himself with buying real estate at enormous figures and holding it in other people’s names.  By and by the newspapers came out with exposures and called Weed and O’Riley “thieves,”—­whereupon the people rose as one man (voting repeatedly) and elected the two gentlemen to their proper theatre of action, the New York legislature.  The newspapers clamored, and the courts proceeded to try the new legislators for their small irregularities.  Our admirable jury system enabled the persecuted ex-officials to secure a jury of nine gentlemen from a neighboring asylum and three graduates from Sing-Sing, and presently they walked forth with characters vindicated.  The legislature was called upon to spew them forth—­a thing which the legislature declined to do.  It was like asking children to repudiate their own father.  It was a legislature of the modern pattern.