His hair was thick, dark and powdered usually with mill-dust.

His eyes, of a clear bright hazel, deep-set and piercing, expressed a violence of nature which his firm, thin-lipped mouth, bare of beard or moustache, appeared to deny.
A certain tenacity--a suggestion of stubbornness in the jaw, gave the final hint to his character, and revealed that temperamental intolerance of others of the rustic who has risen out of his class.

An opinion once embraced acquired the authority of a revelation; a passion once yielded to was transformed into a principle.

Impulsive, generous, undisciplined, he represented, after all, but the reaction from the spirit of racial submission which was embodied in Reuben Merryweather.

Tradition had bound Reuben in thongs of steel; Abel was conscious only of his liberated intelligence--of a passionate desire to test to the fullest the certainty of that liberation.