If he insisted on debts being paid, he was never exacting or cruel.

If he lent money, he never demanded more than eight per cent.; and he never pressed his debtors unduly.

His cheerfulness seldom deserted him, and he was notably kind to the poor.
Not seldom in the winter time a poor man, here and there in the parish, would find dumped down outside his door in the early morning a half-cord of wood or a bag of flour.
It could not be said that Jean Jacques did not enjoy his own generosity.
His vanity, however, did not come from an increasing admiration of his own personal appearance, a weakness which often belongs to middle age; but from the study of his so-called philosophy, which in time became an obsession with him.

In vain the occasional college professors, who spent summer months at St.Saviour's, sought to interest him in science and history, for his philosophy had large areas of boredom; but science marched over too jagged a road for his tender intellectual feet; the wild places where it led dismayed him.

History also meant numberless dates and facts.