Not so with her father. He was almost prostrated from fright and excitement. Jack persuaded him to take some brandy, and this restored him a little.
When he was able to collect himself sufficiently to speak, he caught Jack’s hand, and he said in the simplest tone:
“Friend, this is the second time I owe thee my life, and now I also owe thee my daughter’s.”
I thought it would be just as well if I came away, and so it proved, for on that very night when I was sitting down at the fire in my room thinking over the events of the day, the door was suddenly flung open, and in rushed Jack Langrishe.
“Old fellow, I’m the luckiest dog in the world!”
And I think he was, for the old man had at last given his consent, and Jack Langrishe found in Dorothy Jacob one of the sweetest and best little wives in the whole of Ireland.
MY FIRST CASE.
I had just been admitted a solicitor, and had been induced to start practice, or, rather, to look for it, in a town in one of the midland counties, where I had been persuaded there was a good opening for an attorney, the name by which members of my profession were then generally known. It was in the good old days before examinations became the stiff ordeals that they have been for many years, and I must confess that my attendance in the office where I was supposed to be serving my time was not as regular as it might have been. However, with a fair share of assurance, which the old clerk in my master’s office impressed on me was the chief secret of success, I opened my office, put a brass plate on the door, and installed as my clerk a young fellow of twenty-one or thereabouts, who had had some slight experience in the business of a country office. Day followed day, and the hoped for client never came. My clerk spent the time writing text—“this indenture,” and “whereas,” and other important words, which would figure in the deeds he expected one day to be called on to engross—but he at least had the satisfaction of drawing a salary, not a very large one, it is true, but it was something. As for me, I confess I was beginning to get heartily weary of waiting, and to feel almost ashamed of the brass plate on the door.