eek, it meekly turned unto him the other. It could scarcely
be expected that Neal would bear this. To have the whole world in
friendship with a man is beyond doubt rather an affliction. Not to have
the face of a single enemy to look upon, would decidedly be considered
a deprivation of many agreeable sensations by most people, as well as by
Neal Malone. Let who might sustain a loss, or experience a calamity, it
was a matter of indifference to Neal. They were only his friends, and he
troubled neither his head nor his heart about them.

Heaven help us! There is no man without his trials; and Neal, the
reader perceives, was not exempt from his. What did it avail him that he
carried a cudgel ready for all hostile contingencies? or knit his brows
and shook his kipjoeen at the fiercest of his fighting friends? The
moment he appeared, they softened into downright cordiality. His
presence was the signal of peace; for, notwithstanding his unconquerable
propensity to warfare, he went abroad as the genius of unanimity, though
carrying in his bosom the redoubtable disposition the a warrior; just as
the sun, though the source of light himself, is said to be dark enough
at bottom.

It could not be expected that Neal, with whatever fortitude he might
bear his other afflictions, could bear such tranquillity like a hero. To
say that he bore it as one, would be to basely surrender his character;
for what hero ever bore a state, of tranquillity with courage? It
affected his cutting out! It produced what Burton calls "a windie
melancholie," which was nothing else than an accumulation of courage
that had no means of escaping, if courage can without indignity be ever
said to escape. He sat uneasy on his lap-board. Instead of cutting out
soberly, he nourished his scissors as if he were heading a faction; he
wasted much chalk by scoring his cloth in wrong places, and even caught
his hot goose without a holder. These symptoms alarmed, his friends, who
persuaded him to go to a doctor. Neal went, to satisfy them; but he knew
that no prescription could drive the courage out of him--that he was too
far gone in heroism to be made a coward of by apothecary stuff. Nothing
in the pharmacopoeia could physic him into a pacific state. His disease
was simply the want of an enemy, and an unaccountable superabundance of
friendship on the part of his acquaintances. How could a doctor remedy
this by a prescription? Impossible. The doctor, indeed, recommended
b