He would sit, grum enough, with his feet higher than his head, chewing an unlighted cigar, and leave them both thankful when he saw proper to go.
The truth is, Knowles was thoroughly out of place in these little mending-shops called sick-chambers, where bodies are taken to pieces, and souls set right.

He had no faith in your slow, impalpable cures: all reforms were to be accomplished by a wrench, from the abolition of slavery to the pulling of a tooth.
He had no especial sympathy with Holmes, either: the men were started in life from opposite poles: and with all the real tenderness under his surly, rugged habit, it would have been hard to touch him with the sudden doom fallen on this man, thrown crippled and penniless upon the world, helpless, it might be, for life.

He would have been apt to tell you, savagely, that "he wrought for it." Besides, it made him out of temper to meet the sisters.

Knowles could have sketched for you with a fine decision of touch the role played by the Papal power in the progress of humanity,--how far it served as a stepping-stone, and the exact period when it became a wearisome clog.
The world was done with it now,--utterly.

Its breath was only poisoned, with coming death.