He had no special liking for evil, I am sure;
yet, according to all the theories, his intense love of Nature ought to
have elevated and refined him far more than it had done.
Before we had been an hour together, I had also observed that he was
good-natured, impulsive, and, in a sort, kindly,--that he loved himself
and his own enjoyment too well ever knowingly to annoy or distress
another. There is a little difference between this and kindness. No
matter how I found him out. He who runs may read, if he looks sharply
enough; and in travelling, people betray and assert character
continually. I was also as sure as I was years afterwards, that he would
walk rough-shod over heart-violets and -daisies, nor once notice them
bleeding under his heel. It was in the grain of the man's nature. He had
lived at least thirty-five years, and was too old to be made over into
anything else by any experience.
His bag was half full of tulip-bulbs which he had bought and begged, he
said. He had a passion at present for cultivating tulips, and was quite
sure, that, if he had lived in the seventeenth instead of the nineteenth
century, he would have ruined himself twenty times over for a favorite
bulb, even without being a Dutchman.
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