It could not be expected that Neal, with whatever fortitude he might bear his other afflictions, could bear such tranquillity like a hero.  To say that he bore it as one, would be to basely surrender his character; for what hero ever bore a state, of tranquillity with courage?  It affected his cutting out!  It produced what Burton calls “a windie melancholie,” which was nothing else than an accumulation of courage that had no means of escaping, if courage can without indignity be ever said to escape.  He sat uneasy on his lap-board.  Instead of cutting out soberly, he nourished his scissors as if he were heading a faction; he wasted much chalk by scoring his cloth in wrong places, and even caught his hot goose without a holder.  These symptoms alarmed, his friends, who persuaded him to go to a doctor.  Neal went, to satisfy them; but he knew that no prescription could drive the courage out of him—­that he was too far gone in heroism to be made a coward of by apothecary stuff.  Nothing in the pharmacopoeia could physic him into a pacific state.  His disease was simply the want of an enemy, and an unaccountable superabundance of friendship on the part of his acquaintances.  How could a doctor remedy this by a prescription?  Impossible.  The doctor, indeed, recommended bloodletting; but to lose blood in a peaceable manner was not only cowardly, but a bad cure for courage.  Neal declined it:  he would lose no blood for any man until he could not help it; which was giving the character of a hero at a single touch.  His blood was not to be thrown away in this manner; the only lancet ever applied to his relations was the cudgel, and Neal scorned to abandon the principles of his family.

His friends finding that he reserved his blood for more heroic purposes than dastardly phlebotomy, knew not what to do with him.  His perpetual exclamation was, as we have already stated, “I’m blue-mowlded for want of a batin’!” They did everything in their power to cheer him with the hope of a drubbing; told him he lived in an excellent country for a man afflicted with his malady; and promised, if it were at all possible, to create him a private enemy or two, who, they hoped in heaven, might trounce him to some purpose.

This sustained him for a while; but as day after day passed, and no appearance of action presented itself, he could not choose but increase in courage.  His soul, like a sword-blade too long in the scabbard, was beginning to get fuliginous by inactivity.  He looked upon the point of his own needle, and the bright edge of his scissors, with a bitter pang, when he thought of the spirit rusting within him:  he meditated fresh insults, studied new plans, and hunted out cunning devices for provoking his acquaintances to battle, until by degrees he began to confound his own bram, and to commit more grievous oversights in his business than ever.  Sometimes he sent home to one person a coat, with the legs of a pair of trousers attached to it for sleeves, and despatched to another the arms of the aforesaid coat tacked together as a pair of trousers.