But it does not say that he treasured life a whit less than the man in another room, who, a day or so before, had fought like a lunatic before going under an anesthetic for the amputation of a bad finger.

No man had loved life more than he.

No man had lived nearer it.
It had been a passion with him.

Full of dreams, and always with anticipations ahead, no matter how far short realizations fell, he was an optimist, a lover of the sun and the moon and the stars, a worshiper of the forests and of the mountains, a man who loved his life, and who had fought for it, and yet who was ready--at the last--to yield it up without a whimper when the fates asked for it.
Bolstered up against his pillows, he did not look the part of the fiend he was confessing himself to be to the people about him.

Sickness had not emaciated him.