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 taste—­much 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 song—­a song of the social affections—­a song of hearth and home—­a song which had cheered, and warmed, and softened many a kindly and honest heart:  and with this Happy Jack sang—­and exceedingly well too, but with a sort of dreadfully ludicrous sentiment—­the highly appropriate ditty of My Ain Fireside.

Happy Jack was of no particular profession:  he was a bit of a litterateur, 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.