d directly, O'Neill should be that night arrested.
How Mr. Hill made the discovery of this debt to the grocer agree with his
former notion that the Irish glover had always money at command we cannot
well conceive, but anger and prejudice will swallow down the grossest
contradictions without difficulty.

When Mr. Hill's clerk went to demand payment of the note, O'Neill's head
was full of the ball which he was to give that evening. He was much
surprised at the unexpected appearance of the note: he had not ready
money by him to pay it; and after swearing a good deal at the clerk, and
complaining of this ungenerous and ungentleman-like behaviour in the
grocer and the tanner, he told the clerk to be gone, and not to be
bothering him at such an unseasonable time: that he could not have the
money then, and did not deserve to have it at all.

This language and conduct were rather new to the English clerk's
mercantile ears: we cannot wonder that it should seem to him, as he said
to his master, more the language of a madman than a man of business. This
want of punctuality in money transactions, and this mode of treating
contracts as matters of favour and affection, might not have damned the
fame of our hero in his own country, where such conduct is, alas! too
common; but he was now in a kingdom where the manners and customs are so
directly opposite, that he could meet with no allowance for his national
faults. It would be well for his countrymen if they were made, even by a
few mortifications, somewhat sensible of this important difference in the
habits of Irish and English traders before they come to settle in
England.

But to proceed with our story. On the night of Mr. O'Neill's grand ball,
as he was seeing his fair partner, the perfumer's daughter, safe home, he
felt himself tapped on the shoulder by no friendly hand. When he was
told that he was the king's prisoner, he vociferated with sundry strange
oaths, which we forbear to repeat. "No, I am not the king's prisoner! I
am the prisoner of that shabby, rascally tanner, Jonathan Hill. None but
he would arrest a gentleman in this way, for a trifle not worth
mentioning."

Miss Jenny Brown screamed when she found herself under the protection of
a man who was arrested; and, what between her screams and his oaths,
there was such a disturbance that a mob gathered.

Among this mob there was a party of Irish haymakers, who, after returning
late from a hard day's work, had