The dinner, however, went off with the greatest success. Happy Jack was happier than ever, and consequently irresistible. Every two or three minutes he lugged in something about his household gods and the desolation of his hearth, evidently enjoying the sentiment highly. Then he talked of his plans of taking a new and more expensive house, in a fashionable locality, and furnishing it on a far handsomer scale than the old one. In fact, he seemed rather obliged to the brokers than otherwise for taking the quondam furniture off his hands. It was quite behind the present tastemuch of it positively ugly. He had been ashamed to see his wife sitting in that atrocious old easy-chair, but he hoped that he had taken a step which would change all for the better. Warming with his dinner and the liquor, Happy Jack got more and more eloquent and sentimental. He declaimed upon the virtues of Mrs J., and the beauties of the girls. He proposed all their healths seriatim . He regretted the little incident which had prevented their appearance at the festive board; but though absent in person, he was sure that they were present in spirit; and with this impression, he would beg permission to favour them with a songa song of the social affectionsa song of hearth and homea song which had cheered, and warmed, and softened many a kindly and honest heart: and with this Happy Jack sangand exceedingly well too, but with a sort of dreadfully ludicrous sentimentthe highly appropriate ditty of My Ain Fireside .
Happy Jack was of no particular profession: he was a bit of a littérateur , a bit of a journalist, a bit of a man of business, a bit of an agent, a bit of a projector, a bit of a City man, and a bit of a West-end man. His business, he said, was of a general nature. He was usually to be heard of in connection with apocryphal companies and misty speculations. He was always great as an agitator. As soon as a League was formed, Happy Jack flew to its head-quarters as a vulture to a battle-field. Was it a league for the promotion of vegetarianism?or a league for the lowering of the price of meat?a league for reforming the national costume?or a league for repealing the laws still existing upon the Statute-book against witches?Happy Jack was ever in the thickest of the fray, lecturing, expounding, arguing, getting up extempore meetings of the frequenters of public-houses, of which he sent reports to the morning papers, announcing the 'numerous, highly respectable, and influential' nature of the assembly, and modestly hinting, that Mr Happy Jack, 'who was received with enthusiastic applause, moved, in a long and argumentative address, a series of resolutions pledging the meeting to,' &c. Jack, in fact, fully believed that he had done rather more for free-trade than Cobden. Not, he said, that he was jealous of the Manchester champion; circumstances had made the latter better knownthat he admitted; still he could not but knowand knowing, feelin his own heart of hearts, his own merits, and his own exertions.
The railway mania was, as may be judged, a grand time for Happy Jack. The number of lines of which he was a provisional director, the number of schemes which came outand often at good premiums toounder his auspices; the number of railway journals which he founded, and the number of academies which he established for the instruction of youthful engineersare they not written in the annals of the period? Jack himself started as an engineer without any previous educational ceremony whatever. His manner of laying out a 'direct line' was happy and expeditious. He took a map and a ruler,
and drew upon the one, by the help of the other, a straight stroke in red inkwhich looked professionalfrom terminus to terminus. Afterwards, he stated distinctly in writing, so that there could be no mistake about the matter, that there were no engineering difficultiesthat the landed proprietors along the line were quite enthusiastic in their promotion of the schemeand that the probable profits, as deduced from carefully drawn-up traffic-tables, would be about 35 per cent. At this time, Happy Jack was quite a minor Hudson. He lived in an atmosphere of shares, scrip, and prospectuses. Money poured in from every quarter. A scrap of paper with an application for shares was worth the bright tissue of the Bankand Jack lost no time in changing the one for the other. Amid the mass of railway newspapers, he started The Railway Sleeper Awakened , The Railway Whistle , The Railway Turntable , and The Railway Timetable ; and it was in the first number of the last famous organit lived for three weeksin which appeared a letter signed 'A Constant Reader.' After the bursting of the bubble, Happy Jack appeared to have burst too; for his whereabouts for a long time was unknown, and there were no traditions of his being seen. Then he began to be heard of from distant and constantly varying quarters of the town. Now you had a note from Shepherd's Bush, and next day from Bermondsey. On Tuesday, Jack dated Little King Street, Clapham Road; on Thursday, the communication reached you from Little Queen Street, Victoria Villas, Hackney; and next week perhaps you were favoured with a note from some of the minor little Inns of Court, where the writer would be found getting up a company on the fourth floor in a grimy room, furnished with a high deal-desk, two three-legged stools, and illimitable foolscap, pens, and ink.