Where the Happy Jacks are at this moment no one can tell. They have become invisible since the last clean out. A deprecatory legend has indeed been in circulation, which professed that Jack was dead, and that this was the manner in which, on his deathbed, he provided for his family:
'Mrs Happy Jack,' said the departing man, 'I'm not afraid of you. You have got on some way or other for nearly forty years, and I don't see why you shouldn't get on some way or other for forty more. Therefore, so far as you are concerned, my mind is easy. But, then, you girlsyou poor little inexperienced poppets, who know nothing of the world. There's Jane; but then she's prettyreally beautiful. Why, her face is a fortune: she will of course captivate a rich man; and what more can a father wish? As for EmilyI fear Emily, my dear, you're rather plain than otherwise; but what, I would ask, is beauty?fleeting, transitory, skin-deep. The happiest marriages are those of mutual affectionnot one-sided admiration: so, on the whole, I should say that my mind is easier about Emily than Jane. As for Maria, she's so clever, she can't but get on. As a musician, an artist, an authoress, what bright careers are open for her! While as for you, stupid little Clara,
who never could be taught anythingI very much doubt whether the dunces of this world are not the very happiest people in itYes, Clara; leave to others the vain and empty distinctions of literary renown, which is but a bubble, and be happy in the homely path of obscure but virtuous duty!'
Happy Jack ceased. There was a pause. 'And now,' he said, 'having provided for my family, I will go to sleep, with a clear conscience and a tranquil mind.'
I said that I always distrusted this legend. I am happy to say, that even as I write I have proof positive that it is purely a fiction. I have just had a card put into my hand requesting my presence at a private exhibition of the celebrated Bloomer Family, while an accompanying private note from Jack himself informs me that the 'celebrated and charming Bloomer groupuniversally allowed to be the most perfect and interesting representatives of the new régime in costume'are no other than the Happy Jacks redivivi Mrs J. and the girls donning the transatlantic attire, and Happy Jack himself delivering a lecture upon the vagaries of fashion and the inconsistencies of dress, in a new garment invented by himself, and combining the Roman toga with the Highland kilt.
THE DESERT HOME.
Scalp-huntersThe local habitation of the lost family is a nook in the Great American Deserta nook in a desert twenty-five times the size of England! But this wilderness of about a million square miles is not all sand or all barren earth: it contains numerous other features of interest besides mountains and oases; it includes the country of New Mexico, with its towns and cities; the country round the Great Salt and Utah Lakes, where the germ of a Mormon nation is expanding on all sides; and it is traversed in its whole breadth by the Rocky Mountains. An English family, after being ruined in St Louis, and reduced to their last hundred pounds, are persuaded by a Scottish miner to accompany him across this desert to New Mexico. 'They are a wonderful people,' says the story-teller, 'these same Scotch. They are but a small nation, yet their influence is felt everywhere upon the globe. Go where you will, you will find them in positions of trust and importancealways prospering, yet, in the midst of prosperity, still remembering, with strong feelings of attachment, the land of their birth. They manage the marts of London, the commerce of India, the fur-trade of America, and the mines of Mexico. Over all the American wilderness you will meet them, side by side with the backwoods-pioneer himself, and even pushing him from his own ground. From the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Sea, they have impressed with their Gaelic names rock, river, and mountain; and many an Indian tribe owns a Scotchman for its chief.'
The adventurers join a caravan, which is attacked by Indians, and the family of the destined Robinson find themselves alone in the wilderness, 800 miles from the American frontier on the east, 1000 miles from any civilised settlement on either the north or south, and 200 miles from the farthest advanced lines of New Mexico in the desert. They are, in short, lost; but in due time they are found again by other explorers. These strangers are standing on the edge of a cliff several hundred feet sheer down. 'Away belowfar below where we werelay a lovely valley, smiling in all the luxuriance of bright vegetation. It was of nearly an oval shape, bounded upon all sides by a frowning precipice, that rose around it like a wall. Its length could not have been less than ten miles, and its greatest breadth about half of its length. We were at its upper end, and of course viewed it lengthwise. Along the face of the precipice there were trees hanging out horizontally, and some of them even