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 known—that he admitted; still he could not but know—and knowing, feel—in 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 out—and often at good premiums too—under his auspices; the number of railway journals which he founded, and the number of academies which he established for the instruction of youthful engineers—are 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 ink—which looked professional—from terminus to terminus. Afterwards, he stated distinctly in writing, so that there could be no mistake about the matter, that there were no engineering difficulties—that the landed proprietors along the line were quite enthusiastic in their promotion of the scheme—and 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 Bank—and 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 organ—it lived for three weeks—in 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.

Where Mrs Happy Jack and the young-lady Happy Jacks went to at these times, the boldest speculator has failed to discover: they vanished, as it were, into thin air, and were seen no more till the sunshine came, when they returned with the swallows. The lady herself was a meek, mild creature, skilful in the art of living on nothing, and making up dresses without material. She adored her husband, and believed him the greatest man in the world. On the occurrence of such little household incidents as an execution, or Jack making a rapid act of cabmanship from his own hearth to the cheerful residence of Mr Levi in Cursitor Street, the poor little woman, after having indulged herself in the small luxury of a 'good cry,' would go to work to pack up shirts and socks manfully, and with great foresight, would always bring Jack's daily food in a basket, seeing that Mr Levi's bills are constructed upon a scale of uncommon dimensions; after which, she would eat the dinner with him in the coffee-room, drink to better days, play cribbage, and at last get very nearly as joyous in that greasy, grimy, sorrow-laden room, with bars on the outside of the windows, as if it were the happy home she possessed a few weeks ago, and which she always hoped to possess again. As for the girls, they were trained by too good a master and mistress not to become apt scholars. They knew what a bill of sale was from their tenderest years; the broker's was no unfamiliar face; and they quite understood how to treat a man in possession. Their management of duns was consummate. Happy Jack used to listen to the comedy of excuses and coaxings; and when the importunate had departed, grumblingly and unpaid, he used solemnly to kiss his daughters on the forehead, and invoke all sorts of blessings upon his preservers, his good angels, his little girls, who were so clever, and so faithful, and so true.

And in many respects they were good girls. The style in which they turned frocks, put a new appearance upon hoods, and cloaks, and bonnets, and came forth in what seemed the very lustre of novelty—the whole got up by a skilful mutual adaptation of garments and parts of garments—was wonderful to all lady beholders. In cookery, they beat the famous chef who sent up five courses and a dessert, made out of a greasy pair of jack-boots and the grass from the ramparts of the besieged town. Their wonderful little made-dishes were mere scraps and fragments, which in any other house would have been flung away, but which were so artistically and scientifically handled by the young ladies, and so tossed up, and titivated, and eked out with gravies, and sauces, and strange devices of nondescript pasty, that Happy Jack, feasting upon these wonderful creations of ingenuity, used to vow that he never dined so well as when there was nothing in the house for dinner. To their wandering, predatory life the whole family were perfectly accustomed. A sudden turn out of quarters they cared no more for than hardened old dragoons. They never lost pluck. One speculation down, another came on. Sometimes the little household was united. A bit of luck in the City or the West had been achieved, and Happy Jack issued cards for 'At Homes,' and behaved, and looked, and spoke like an alderman, or the member of a house of fifty years' standing. When strangers saw his white waistcoat, and blue coat with brass buttons, and heard him talk of a glut of gold, and money being a mere drug, they speculated as to whether he was the governor or the vice-governor of the Bank of England, or only the man who signs the five-pound notes. That day six weeks, Jack had probably 'come through the court;' a process which he always used somehow to achieve with flying colours, behaving in such a plausible and fascinating way to the commissioner, that that functionary regularly made a speech, in which he congratulated Happy Jack on his candour, and evident desire to deal fairly with his creditors, and told him he left that court without the shadow of a stain upon his character. In the Bench, in dreary suburban lodgings, or in the comfortable houses which they sometimes occupied, the Happy Jacks were always the Happy Jacks. Their constitution triumphed over everything. If anything could ruffle their serenity, it was the refusal of a tradesman to give credit. But uno avulso non deficit alter, as Jack was accustomed, on such occasions, classically to say to his wife—presently deviating into the corresponding vernacular of—'Well, my dear, if one cock fights shy, try another.'

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