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