If it were a picture, he wanted to burn the picture, cut it, tear it, trample it under foot, get it off the face of the earth immediately, at any cost or risk.

It had no business to exist: if nobody else would make way with it, he must.

He often saw places that he would have liked to devastate, to blot out of existence if he could, just because they were barren and unsightly.

Once, when he was a very little child, he suddenly seized a book of his father's,--an old, shabby, worn dictionary,--and flung it into the fire with uncontrollable passion; and, on being asked why he did it, had nothing to say in justification of his act, except this extraordinary statement: "It was an ugly book; it hurt me.

Ugly books ought to go in the fire." What the child suffered, and, still more, what the man suffered from this hatred of ugliness, no words could portray.