ts original fire, not a nerve or
sinew was unbraced by care, labor, or struggle. He stood before us, a
noble specimen of the strong and stalwart growth of a new and
unexhausted land.

NOTE,--The foregoing must have been written years ago, if
one may judge by the color of the paper; and as the writer is now
abroad, so as not to be within reach, the manuscript has been put
into the hands of a gentleman who has been more or less acquainted
with Mr. Neal from his boyhood up, and he has consented to finish
the article by bringing down the record to our day, and putting on
what he calls a 'snapper.'

Most of what follows, if we do not wholly misunderstand the intimations
that accompany the manuscript, is in the very language of Mr. Neal
himself word for word; gathered up we care not how, whether from
correspondence or conversation, so that there is no breach of manly
trust and no indecorum to be charged.

'As to my family,' he writes, in reply to some body's questioning, 'I
know not where they originated, nor how. Sometimes I have thought,
although I have never said as much before, that we must have come up of
ourselves--the spontaneous growth of a rude, rocky soil, swept by the
boisterous north-wind, and washed by the heavy surges of some great
unvisited sea. Of course, the writer you mention, who says that my
ancestors--if I ever had any--'came from Scotland,' must know something
that I never heard of, to the best of my recollection and belief.
Somewhere in England I have supposed they originated, and probably along
the coast of Essex; for there, about Portsmouth and Dover, I have always
felt so much at home in the graveyards--among my own household, as it
were, the names being so familiar to me, and the grave-stones now to be
seen in Portsmouth and Dover, New-Hampshire, where the Neals were first
heard of three or four generations ago, being duplicates of some I saw
in Portsmouth and Dover, England.

'Others have maintained, with great earnestness and plausibility, as if
it were something to brag of, that we have the blood of Oliver Cromwell
in us; and one, at least, who has gone a-field into heraldry, and
strengthens every position with armorial bearings--which only goes to
show the unprofitableness of all such labor, so far as we are
concerned--that we are of the '_red_ O'Neals,' not the _learned_
O'Neals, if there ever were any, but the 'red O'Neals of Ireland,' and
that I am, in