He's a dodgy Peeping Tom.

In the early days of American settlement, hides were built into houses to provide protection from the Indians and to conceal merchandise from the threat of taxation or thievery.

At the beginning of December, the position was that the Chinese still insisted upon the suspension of hostilities without reservations—an attempt to save the Chinchow area from Japanese hands—while the Japanese declared that they must have a free hand to deal with bandits after the suspension of hostilities—bandits being an elastic phrase which, as events proved, was employed to cover operations against regular Chinese forces thirty thousand strong.

Optimism is a notion that there's sufficient evidence that would allow us to infer that if we keep doing what we're doing, things will get better. I don't believe that. I'm a prisoner of hope, that's something else. Cutting against the grain, against the evidence'.