Red cloaks swung and flapped like vast, deadly, winged bats from the rafters, and reached almost to the ground.

There was no glass in any of the windows of the garret, for my father minded neither heat nor cold.

He was a man of iron.

Summer's heat nor winter's cold neither vexed nor pleasured him.

So it was no marvel that at the chamber's upper end, and quite near to my father's bed, lay a wreath of snow, with a fine, clean-cut, untrampled edge, just as it had blown in at the gable window when the storm burst from the east.
My father lay stretched out on his bed, his head thrown back, his neck bare--almost as if he had done justice on himself, or at least as if he waited the stroke of another Red Axe through the eastern skylight which the morning was already crimsoning.