“Yes; the horse shied and upset the sleigh; and John says that all his—I mean John’s—ribs are broken, and that he is kilt entirely; and he swears that he’ll make you pay for it—that he’ll sue you.”
“Let him sue away and be hanged; he’ll get nothing for his pains but the pleasure of spending his earnings; he is my servant and has to run the risk of being hurt in my employment.”[8]
“But then, Eliza Jane, the housemaid, was with him, was thrown out too, and had all the skin taken off her face; and she says she’ll sue too.”
“Oh, I’m sorry for that; I like her, and then she was so pretty.”
“Eldon! how dare you say so—to your wife, too!”
“I—I—only meant that I would have to pay for the damage to her, and that if I did not do it willingly, any jury would be persuaded by her pretty face to give a heavy sum against me for the injury done to her by my servant.[9] Well, ’tis a pretty how-do-ye-do for a New Year’s gift. I’ll go down and see the wretch.”
Off I went, glad to get out of Elizabeth’s sight. She had grown a little jealous because I had shown a few trifling civilities to pretty Eliza Jane,—very trifling they were, I assure you; besides I wanted to vent my rage on the man John. In a very short time some words and phrases were used in the yard to which, doubtless, Moses would have objected, if he had the first table of stone in his hand. My ire, however, cooled down in time when I found that the man was “all serene,” and that all the trouble had been caused by the horse having taken fright at the fall of a lot of snow and ice off a house-top—a circumstance over which, of course, I had not the slightest control; and therefore I was not liable to Dr. Bolus, the old man, nor to pretty Eliza Jane.[10] But to make matters all straight I gave my man a couple of dollars, and meeting E. J. on the back-stairs as I went in I chucked her under her dimpled chin, and told her that crying would make her pretty eyes look red and swollen; and then retiring to my library read up all the cases bearing on the subject, beginning with the old case of Michael v. Alistree,[11] where the defendants “in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, a place where people are always going to and fro about their business, brought a coach with two ungovernable horses, et ex improvide, incaute et absque consideratione inaptitudinis loci, there drove them, etc., and the horses, because of their ferocity, being not to be managed, ran into the plaintiff, and hurt and grievously wounded him,” and the plaintiff got damages as well as damaged.
At the appointed hour my friend and young brother-in-the-law, Tom Jones, arrived. As he sank into one of the softest of our drawing-room chairs, and gazed around, he exclaimed:—
“By Jove, Eldon, you look so snug and cosy here that I am half inclined to follow suit, quit our bachelor’s hall, marry a nice little girl I wot of, and settle down.”
“Do so at once,” said my wife.