. His
school education began early, as his mother was a celebrated teacher.
From his mother's school he went to the town school, where he once
declared in our hearing that he 'got licked, frozen, and stupefied.'
That he had a rough time, may be inferred from the fact that his parents
were Quakers, and he, notwithstanding his peaceful birthright, _fought_
his way through the school as 'Quaker Neal.' He went barefoot in those
days through a great deal of trouble. Somewhere in his early life, he
went to a Quaker boarding-school at Windham, where he always averred
that they starved him through two winters, till it was a luxury to get a
mouthful of brown bread that was not a crumb or fragment that some one
had left. At this school the boys learned to sympathize in advance with
Oliver Twist--to eat trash, till they would quarrel for a bit of salt
fish-skin, and to generalize in their hate of Friends from very narrow
data. We have heard Neal speak of the two winters he spent in that
school as by far the most miserable six or eight months of his whole
life.

Very early, we think at the age of twelve years, he was imprisoned
behind a counter, and continued there till he was near twenty; and by
the time he was twenty one, he had worked his way to a retail shop of
his own in Court street, Boston. We next track him to Baltimore, where,
in 1815, if we are not out in our chronology, John Pierpont, John Neal,
and Joseph L. Lord were in partnership in a wholesale trade. Neal's
somersets in business--from partnership to wholesale jobbing, which he
went into on his own hook with a capital of _one hundred and fifty
dollars_, and as he once said, in speaking of this remarkable business
operation, 'with about as much credit as a lamp-lighter'--may not be any
more interesting to the public than they were to him then; so we shall
not be particular about them in this chapter of chronicles.

At Baltimore he was very successful, after he got at it, in making
money, but failed after the peace in 1816. This failure made him a
lawyer. With his characteristic impetuosity, he renounced and denounced
trade, determined to study law, and beat the profession with its own
weapons.

This impulse drove him at rather more than railroad speed. He studied as
if a demon chased him. By computation of then Justice Story, he
accomplished fourteen years' hard work in four. During this time he was
reading largely in half-a-dozen languages that he knew nothing of