The Ned M'Keown Stories 

Excerpt: Honest, blustering, good-humored Ned was the indefatigable merchant of the village; ever engaged in some ten or twenty pound speculation, the capital of which he was sure to extort, perhaps for the twelfth time, from the savings of Nancy’s frugality, by the equivocal test of a month or six weeks’ consecutive sobriety, and which said speculation he never failed to wind up by the total loss...