All available accounts agree in describing him as merciless. He foreclosed mortgages with pitiless promptitude, and his adroit knowledge of the law, approaching if not reaching, that of an unscrupulous pettifogger, enabled him to get the upper hand in every transaction. His personal habits were considered repulsive by the conventional and fastidious. "He was dry and caustic in his remarks," says Houghton, "and very rarely spared the object of his satire. He was plain and careless in his dress, looking more a beggar than a millionaire."
HIS VAGARIES—SO CALLED.
There were certain other conventional respects in which he was woefully deficient, and he had certain singularities which severely taxed the comprehension of routine minds. None who had the appearance of respectable charity seekers could get anything else from him than contemptuous rebuffs. For respectability in any form he had no use; he scouted and scoffed at it and pulverized it with biting and grinding sarcasm. But once any man or woman passed over the line of respectability into the besmeared realm of sheer disrepute,