"There's nothin' the matter with Bibbs except he hates work so much it makes him sick.

I put him in the machine-shop, and I guess I know what I'm doin' about as well as the next man.

Ole Doc Gurney always was one o' them nutty alarmists.
Does he think I'd do anything 'd be bad for my own flesh and blood?
He makes me tired!" Anything except perfectly definite health or perfectly definite disease was incomprehensible to Sheridan.

He had a genuine conviction that lack of physical persistence in any task involving money must be due to some subtle weakness of character itself, to some profound shiftlessness or slyness.

He understood typhoid fever, pneumonia, and appendicitis--one had them, and either died or got over them and went back to work--but when the word "nervous" appeared in a diagnosis he became honestly suspicious: he had the feeling that there was something contemptible about it, that there was a nigger in the wood-pile somewhere.
"Look at me," he said.