He never seemed to think it a trouble to talk to me, and, I am sure, it was never a task to me to listen.

It was not his way to treat subjects coldly and vaguely; he rarely generalized, never prosed.
He seemed to like nice details almost as much as I liked them myself: he seemed observant of character: and not superficially observant, either.

These points gave the quality of interest to his discourse; and the fact of his speaking direct from his own resources, and not borrowing or stealing from books--here a dry fact, and there a trite phrase, and elsewhere a hackneyed opinion--ensured a freshness, as welcome as it was rare.

Before my eyes, too, his disposition seemed to unfold another phase; to pass to a fresh day: to rise in new and nobler dawn.
His mother possessed a good development of benevolence, but he owned a better and larger.

I found, on accompanying him to the Basse-Ville--the poor and crowded quarter of the city--that his errands there were as much those of the philanthropist as the physician.