His little churches at Viking and Sunburst were always well
attended--often filled to overflowing--and the people gave liberally to
the offertory: and I never knew any clergyman, however holy, who did not
view such a proceeding with a degree of complacency. In the pulpit Roscoe
was almost powerful. His knowledge of the world, his habits of
directness, his eager but not hurried speech, his unconventional but
original statements of things, his occasional literary felicity and
unusual tact, might have made him distinguished in a more cultured
community. Yet there was something to modify all this: an occasional
indefinable sadness, a constant note of pathetic warning. It struck me
that I never had met a man whose words and manner were at times so
charged with pathos; it was artistic in its searching simplicity. There
was some unfathomable fount in his nature which was even beyond any
occurrence of his past; some radical, constitutional sorrow, coupled with
a very strong, practical, and even vigorous nature.
One of his most ardent admirers was a gambler, horse-trader, and
watch-dealer, who sold him a horse, and afterwards came and offered him
thirty dollars, saying that the horse was worth that much less than
Roscoe had paid for it, and protesting that he never could resist the
opportunity of getting the best of a game.
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