Wood was a man of strong passions, sparingly gifted with common sense, and exceedingly superstitious. No one could be kinder to one’s friends or relatives, or more hospitable to a stranger; but when once offended, he was implacable. He had but little in his power either as a friend or an enemy--his course through the world lying barely beyond the bleak edge of poverty. If a neighbour, however, dropped in by accident at meal-time, he would not be suffered to quit his house until he had shared with him his simple fare. There was benevolence in the very grasp of his hand and the twinkle of his eye, and in the little set speech, still preserved by tradition, in which he used to address his wife every time an old or mutilated beggar came to the door:--“Alms, gudewife,” he would say; “alms to the cripple, and the blin’, and the broken-down.” When injured or insulted, however, and certainly no one could do either without being very much in the wrong, there was a toad-like malignity in his nature, that would come leaping out like the reptile from its hole, and no power on earth could shut it up again. He would sit hatching his venom for days and weeks together with a slow, tedious, unoperative kind of perseverance, that achieved nothing. He was full of anecdote; and, in all his stories, human nature was exhibited in only its brightest lights and its deepest shadows, without the slightest mixture of that medium tint which gives colour to its working, everyday suit. Whatever was bad in the better class, he transferred to the worse, and _vice versa_; and thus not even his narratives of the supernatural were less true to nature and fact than his narratives of mere men and women. And he dealt with the two classes of stories after one fashion--lending the same firm belief to both alike.