him, with a dandelion blossom to place in his button-hole. His wife was a woman of few words, but she sometimes said to her neighbours, with a quiet kind of satisfaction, “Everybody loves my husband that knows him. They can’t help it.” Simeon Green’s acquaintance knew that he was never engaged in a law-suit in his life; but they predicted that he would find it impossible to avoid it now. They told him his next neighbour was determined to quarrel with people, whether they would or not; that he was like John Liburne, of whom Judge Jenkins said, “If the world was emptied of every person but himself, Liburne would still quarrel with John, and John with Liburne.” “Is _that_ his character?” said Simeon, in his smiling way. “If he exercises it upon _me_, I will _soon_ kill him.” In every neighbourhood there are individuals who like to foment disputes, not from any definite intention of malice or mischief, but merely because it makes a little ripple of excitement in the dull stream of life, like a contest between dogs or game-cocks. Such people were not slow in repeating Simeon Green’s remark about his wrangling neighbour. “Kill _me_! will he?” exclaimed Reuben. He said no more; but his tightly compressed mouth had such a significant expression, that his dog dodged him, as he would the track of a tiger. That very night, Reuben turned his horse into the highway, in hopes he would commit some depredations on neighbour Green’s premises. But Joe Smith, seeing the animal at large, let down the bars of Reuben’s own corn-field, and the poor beast walked in, and feasted as he had not done for many a year. It would have been a great satisfaction to Reuben if he could have brought a lawsuit against his horse; but as it was, he was obliged to content himself with beating him. His next exploit was to shoot Mary Green’s handsome chanticleer, because he stood on the stone wall and crowed, in the ignorant joy of his heart, two inches beyond the frontier line that bounded the contiguous farms. Simeon said he was sorry for the poor bird, and sorry because his wife and children liked the pretty creature; but otherwise it was no great matter. He had been intending to build a poultry yard, with a good high fence, that his hens might not annoy his neighbours; and now he was admonished to make haste and do it. He would build them a snug warm house to roost in; they should have plenty of gravel and oats, and room to promenade back and forth, and crow and cackle to their heart’s content; there they could enjoy themselves, and be out of harm’s way.