In the pulpit Roscoe was almost powerful.

His knowledge of the world, his habits of directness, his eager but not hurried speech, his unconventional but original statements of things, his occasional literary felicity and unusual tact, might have made him distinguished in a more cultured community.

Yet there was something to modify all this: an occasional indefinable sadness, a constant note of pathetic warning.

It struck me that I never had met a man whose words and manner were at times so charged with pathos; it was artistic in its searching simplicity.

There was some unfathomable fount in his nature which was even beyond any occurrence of his past; some radical, constitutional sorrow, coupled with a very strong, practical, and even vigorous nature.
One of his most ardent admirers was a gambler, horse-trader, and watch-dealer, who sold him a horse, and afterwards came and offered him thirty dollars, saying that the horse was worth that much less than Roscoe had paid for it, and protesting that he never could resist the opportunity of getting the best of a game.