ected, for they hated one
another with an ardency much too good-humored and buoyant; and, between
ourselves, to bring Paddy over a bottle is a very equivocal mode of
giving him an anti-cudgeling disposition. After the hour of four,
several of the factions were getting very friendly, which I knew at the
time to be a bad sign. Many of them nodded to each other, which I
knew to be a worse one; and some of them shook hands with the greatest
cordiality, which I no sooner saw than I slipped the knot of my cravat,
and held myself in preparation for the sport.

"I have often had occasion to remark--and few men, let me tell you, had
finer opportunities of doing so--the differential symptomatics between a
Party Fight, that is, a battle between Orangemen and Ribbon-men, and one
between two Roman Catholic Factions. There is something infinitely more
anxious, silent, and deadly, in the compressed vengeance, and the hope
of slaughter, which characterize a party fight, than is to be seen in
a battle between factions. The truth is, the enmity is not so deep
and well-grounded in the latter as in the former. The feeling is not
political nor religious between the factions; whereas, in the other, it
is both, which is a mighty great advantage; for when this is adjuncted
to an intense personal hatred, and a sense of wrong, probably arising
from a too intimate recollection of the leaded black thorn, or the
awkward death of some relative, by the musket or the bayonet, it is apt
to produce very purty fighting, and much respectable retribution.

"In a party fight, a prophetic sense of danger, hangs, as it were, over
the crowd--the very air is loaded with apprehension; and the vengeance
burst is proceeded by a close, thick darkness, almost sulphury, that is
more terrifical than the conflict itself, though dearly less dangerous
and fatal. The scowl of the opposing parties, the blanched cheeks, the
knit brows, and the grinding teeth, not pretermitting the deadly gleams
that shoot from their kindled eyes, are ornaments which a plain battle
between factions cannot boast, but which, notwithstanding, are very
suitable to the fierce and gloomy silence of that premeditated vengeance
which burns with such intensity in the heart, and scorches up the vitals
into such a thirst for blood. Not but that they come by different means
to the same conclusion; because it is the feeling, and not altogether
the manner of operation, that is different.

"Now a faction