curdles the milk of human kindness.

With him, goodness meant gloom. If the sweet joy of living ever sang
to him in his youth, he shut his ears to the sound as to siren
temptings, and sternly set himself to the fierce delight of being
miserable.

For misery he had reason enough. Having writ a book in which he called
King Charles "a man of blood and everlasting abomination"--whatever
that might mean--Eli Kirke got himself star-chambered. When, in the
language of those times, he was examined "before torture, in torture,
between torture, and after torture"--the torture of the rack and the
thumbkins and the boot--he added to his former testimony that the queen
was a "Babylonish woman, a Potiphar, a Jezebel, a--"

There his mouth was gagged, head and heels roped to the rack, and a
wrench given the pulleys at each end that nigh dismembered his poor,
torn body. And what words, think you, came quick on top of his first
sharp outcry?

"Wisdom is justified of her children! The wicked shall he pull down
and the humble shall he exalt!"

And when you come to think of it, Charles Stuart lost his head on the
block five years from that day.

When Eli Kirke left jail to take ship for Boston Town both ears had
been cropped. On his forehead the letters S L--seditious libeler--were
branded deep, though not so deep as the bitterness burned into his soul.