Jack, however, was not destined to drink the cup of this bitter experience. He was just as popular and just as much courted without a penny in his pocket, as he was when he possessed the means to be extravagant, when he
"Spread to the liberal air his silken sails,
And lavished guineas like a Prince of Wales."
The secret of his prodigious popularity was his obliging disposition. His time and talents—and he had plenty of the former, and no lack of the latter—were always at the service of his friends; and though the idlest dog in the world when his own affairs were in question, in the cause of his friends he was the busiest man alive. Thus he fairly won his dinners, his rides, his drives, and his opera tickets—they were trifling commissions on his benevolent transactions.
"Jack," one fellow would say, "my horse is too confoundedly high strung, and only half broke. He threw me yesterday."
"I'll ride him for you, Bill," would be the ready reply; "give me your spurs, and I'll give him a lesson."
And away he would go, without a thought of his neck, to mount a restive rascal that had half killed the rough rider of a cavalry regiment.
"Jack," another would say, "I've got an awkward affair on hand with Lieutenant ——; he fancies I've insulted him, and has thrown out dark hints about coffee and pistols."
"Make yourself perfectly easy, my boy; I'll bring him to reason or fight him myself."
So Jack had his hands full of business. Well, one dreary, desolate afternoon in March, when the barbs of all the vanes in the city were looking pertinaciously eastward, and people were shivering over anthracite grates, Jack Withers "might have been seen," as James would say, seated in the little back parlor of the coffee room in School Street, sipping Mocha with his particular friend Bill Bliffins, who had an especial claim upon his kindness, from the fact that he had already extricated Bill from scrapes innumerable.
Mocha is a great prompter of social and kindly feelings, and prompts, in tête-à-têtes, to that unreserved confidence on one part, and that obliging interest on the other, which unite two congenial and kindred spirits in adamantine bonds.