He is the State's cormorant, one that fishes for the public but feeds himself; the misery is he fishes without the cormorant's property, a rope to strengthen the gullet and to make him disgorge. A sequestrator! He is the devil's nut-hook, the sign with him is always in the clutches. There are more monsters retain to him than to all the limbs in anatomy.
Sometimes when he talked with her, ever in his chastened part of the rough old soldier, he laughed in his sleeve at the difference between part and true man. The nut-hook humor of it was that both were realities, or, perhaps, that neither were realities.