Hill was one of the notabilities of that immense throng.

A great, broad-shouldered, giant, in the prime of his manhood--the beginning of his thirtieth year--he was as good-natured as big, and as mild-mannered as brave.

He spoke slowly, softly, and with a slightly rustic twang, that was very tempting to a certain class of sharps to take him up for a "luberly greeny." The man who did so usually repented his error in sack-cloth and ashes.
Hill first came into prominence as the victor in the most stubbornly contested fight in the prison history of Belle Isle.

When the squad of the One Hundredth Ohio--captured at Limestone Station, East Tennessee, in September,1863--arrived on Belle Isle, a certain Jack Oliver, of the Nineteenth Indiana, was the undisputed fistic monarch of the Island.
He did not bear his blushing honors modestly; few of a right arm that indefinite locality known as "the middle of next week," is something that the possessor can as little resist showing as can a girl her first solitaire ring.

To know that one can certainly strike a disagreeable fellow out of time is pretty sure to breed a desire to do that thing whenever occasion serves.