upied as a private residence before New
York moved up "above Bleecker,"--and advancing towards the front under
the guidance of the respectful official, passed the table at which sat
the half-bald, stern-faced, and iron-gray Deputy Superintendent
Carpenter, through the door that had once separated the two parlors, and
stood in the presence of another iron-gray man, seated writing at a
table covered with books and papers, his back to the front of the
building, and the smooth-shaven and round-faced Inspector Leonard busily
examining a roll of papers behind him in the corner.

Few men in this whole country have occupied a more marked position in
the public mind, during all this struggle, than Superintendent Kennedy,
in his legitimate position at the head of the Police and in what we must
believe to have been his illegitimate one as Provost Marshal. He made
himself peculiarly conspicuous, and won the enmity of all the secession
wing of the Northern democracy, by stopping the shipment of arms to the
rebellious States, and blocking the apparent game of Mayor Wood and his
aiders and abettors to curry favor with the extreme South by truckling
to every one of its arrogant dictations. The enmity then created has
never died, and can never die until those who hold it happen to die
themselves. At the same time, those who were and are unconditionally
loyal to the Union, have never judged the action of Superintendent
Kennedy very harshly--aware that _something_ needed to be done to
prevent the existing evil, and that only a man of his indomitable
"pluck" could be found to apply the remedy at such a period.

A somewhat broader and more general charge has since been preferred
against him--that in the exercise of the duties of Provost Marshal,
which he assumed without propriety, he showed himself a willing tool of
governmental despotism and displayed indefensible harshness and
arrogance. There is something of truth in this charge, beyond a
question,--as the impossibility of "touching pitch" without being
"defiled," applies to intercourse with wrong-doers high in power as well
as to those in lower station. The station-houses of the New York police
were certainly made receptacles for accused parties whose crimes were
very different from those contemplated in their erection,--just as the
forts in the harbors of New York and Boston have been made "Bastilles"
for state-prisoners whose arrests were signally reckless and improper.
Many of the p