John Neal's personal appearance is a credit to the country. He is tall, with a broad chest, and a most imposing presence. One of the finest sights we ever saw, was Neal standing with his arms folded before a fine picture. His devotion to physical exercise, and his personal example to his family in the practice of it--training his wife and children to take the sparring-gloves and cross the foils with him in those graceful attitudes which he could perfectly teach, because they were fully developed in himself--all this has inevitably contributed to the health and beauty of his beautiful family. Few men have had so many right ideas of the art or science of living as John Neal, and fewer still have acted upon them so faithfully. When we last saw him, some ten years since--when he had lived more than half a century--his eye had lost none of its original fire, not a nerve or sinew was unbraced by care, labor, or struggle. He stood before us, a noble specimen of the strong and stalwart growth of a new and unexhausted land. NOTE,--The foregoing must have been written years ago, if one may judge by the color of the paper; and as the writer is now abroad, so as not to be within reach, the manuscript has been put into the hands of a gentleman who has been more or less acquainted with Mr. Neal from his boyhood up, and he has consented to finish the article by bringing down the record to our day, and putting on what he calls a 'snapper.' Most of what follows, if we do not wholly misunderstand the intimations that accompany the manuscript, is in the very language of Mr. Neal himself word for word; gathered up we care not how, whether from correspondence or conversation, so that there is no breach of manly trust and no indecorum to be charged. 'As to my family,' he writes, in reply to some body's questioning, 'I know not where they originated, nor how. Sometimes I have thought, although I have never said as much before, that we must have come up of ourselves--the spontaneous growth of a rude, rocky soil, swept by the boisterous north-wind, and washed by the heavy surges of some great unvisited sea. Of course, the writer you mention, who says that my ancestors--if I ever had any--'came from Scotland,' must know something that I never heard of, to the best of my recollection and belief. Somewhere in England I have supposed they originated, and probably along the coast of Essex; for there, about Portsmouth and Dover, I have always felt so much at home in the graveyards--among my own household, as it were, the names being so familiar to me, and the grave-stones now to be seen in Portsmouth and Dover, New-Hampshire, where the Neals were first heard of three or four generations ago, being duplicates of some I saw in Portsmouth and Dover, England.