Those who defend and advocate the practice of duelling, if asked to explain the motives leading a gentleman to fight, would generally answer somewhat to this effect: in the first place, personal courage which induces a man to despise danger and death, in comparison with any question affecting his own honor, or that of those connected with him; secondly, a respect for the opinion of the society in which he moves, which opinion, to a certain extent, supplies and fixes the definition of honor. Hence it would follow that, given a man who is neither physically brave, nor bound by any particular respect for the opinion of his daily associates, and the world he moves in, such a man would not be likely to give or accept a challenge. The case under Ashburner's observation afforded a palpable contradiction to this conclusion. Henry Benson was not personally valorous; what courage he possessed was rather of a moral than a physical kind. Where he appeared to be daring and heedless, it proved on examination to be the result of previous knowledge and practice, which gave him confidence and armed him with impunity. Thus he would drive his trotters at any thing, and shave through "tight places" on rough and crowded roads, his whiffle-trees tipping and his hubs grazing the surrounding wheels in a way that at first made Ashburner shudder in spite of himself; but it was because his experience in wagon-driving enabled him to measure distances within half-an-inch, and to catch an available opening immediately. On the other hand, in their pedestrian trips across country in Westchester, he was very chary of jumping fences or ditches till he had ascertained by careful practice his exact capacity for that sort of exercise. He would ride his black horse, Daredevil, who was the terror of all the servants and women in his neighborhood, because he had made himself perfectly acquainted with all the animal's stock of tricks, and was fully prepared for them as they came; but he never went the first trip in a new steamboat or railroad line. He ate and drank many things considered unhealthy, because he understood exactly from experience what and how much he could take without injury; but you could not have bribed him to sit fifteen minutes in wet boots. In short, he was a man who took excellent care of himself, _canny_ as a Scot or a New-Englander, loving the good things of life, and not disposed to hazard them on slight grounds. Then as to the approbation or disapprobation of those about him, he was almost entirely careless of it. On any point beyond the cut of a coat, the decoration of a room, the concoction of a dish, or the merits of a horse, there were not ten people in his own set whose opinion he heeded. To the remarks of foreigners he was a little more sensitive, but even these he was more apt to retort upon by a _tu quoque_ than to be influenced by. Add to all this, that he had the convenient excuse