cendant of such a fighting family should be
doomed to pass through life peaceably, while so many excellent rows and
riots took place around him. It was a calamity to see every man's head
broken but his own; a dismal thing to observe his neighbors go about
with their bones in bandages, yet his untouched; and his friends beat
black and blue, whilst his own cuticle remained undiscolored.

"Blur-an'-agers!" exclaimed Neal one day, when half-tipsy in the fair,
"am I never to get a bit of fightin'? Is there no cowardly spalpeen to
stand afore Neal Malone? Be this an' be that, I'm blue-mowlded for want
of a batin'! I'm disgracin' my relations by the life I'm ladin'! Will
none o' ye fight me aither for love, money, or whiskey--frind or inimy,
an' bad luck to ye? I don't care a traneen which, only out o' pure
frindship, let us have a morsel o' the rale kick-up, 'tany rate. Frind
or inimy, I say agin, if you regard me; sure that makes no differ, only
let us have the fight."

This excellent heroism was all wasted; Neal could not find a single
adversary. Except he divided himself like Hotspur, and went to buffets,
one hand against the other, there was no chance of a fight; no person
to be found sufficiently magnanimous to encounter the tailor. On the
contrary, every one of his friends--or, in other words, every man in the
parish--was ready to support him. He was clapped on the back, until his
bones were nearly dislocated in his body; and his hand shaken, until his
arm lost its cunning at the needle for half a week afterwards. This, to
be sure, was a bitter business--a state of being past endurance. Every
man was his friend--no man was his enemy. A desperate position for any
person to find himself in, but doubly calamitous to a martial tailor.

Many a dolorous complaint did Neal make upon the misfortune of having
none to wish him ill; and what rendered this hardship doubly oppressive,
was the unlucky fact that no exertions of his, however offensive, could
procure him a single foe. In vain did lie insult, abuse, and malign all
his acquaintances. In vain did he father upon them all the rascality
and villany he could think of; he lied against them with a force and
originality that would have made many a modern novelist blush for
want of invention--but all to no purpose. The world for once became
astonishingly Christian; it paid back all his efforts to excite its
resentment with the purest of charity; when Neal struck it on the
one ch