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It was Colligan; and, as the two gigs met in the narrow road, the dirty gallipot took off his hat, and was very sorry to trouble Lord Ballindine, but had a few words to say to him on very important and pressing business. Lord Ballindine touched his hat, and intimated that he was ready to listen, but gave no signs of getting out of his gig.
I don't know where I shall go. It would mortify mother dreadfully to have me driving about Philadelphia in a doctor's gig." Philip laughed at the idea of it. "And does it seem as necessary to you to do it as it did before you came to Fallkill?"
In a very short time, by his blows-out and his bachelorship, for single men always arrive at the apex of haut ton more easily than married, he became the very glass of fashion; and many were the tight apprentices, even at the west end of the town, who used to turn back in admiration of Bachelor Bill, when of a Sunday afternoon he drove down his varment gig to his snug little box on the borders of Turnham Green.
But it was in our new boat that we were particularly fortunate: sloop-rigged, not much longer than our gig, but with more beam and plenty of freeboard, decked over to the mast, and well found in sails and rigging. After our experience in a boat the gunwale of which was not more than eighteen inches out of water, we felt that we had a craft able to cross the Atlantic.
And with foresight he even instructed the boat's crew to keep the gig just abaft the main rigging of the brig. "When you see me drop into her all of a sudden, shove off and pull for dear life." Somehow just then he was not so anxious for a shot, but he held on with a determined mental grasp to his fine resolution, lest it should slip away from him and perish in a sea of doubts.
"Having said that the gig built to carry one is made to carry fifteen, I am, of course, expected to explain how this is accomplished. There is an old French proverb, according to which, when there is enough for one there is enough for two; but I am not aware of any proverb in any language which says, that when there is enough for one, there is enough for fifteen.
If he perceived a mob of cattle or horses on a distant flat, he would set off to have a look at them and determine whether they were strangers or friends, dragging the gig after him "over bank, bush, and scaur." Once when we were in great despair for a cart-horse, Jack was elected to the post, but long before we had come to the journey's end we regretted our choice.
He took an interest in the work of the farm, drove to the quarry two or three times a day in his gig, was present whenever a new piece of work was started, and would often throw off his coat and take a hand in it. Fair Maria laid his table and made his bed, and he was not afraid of showing his kindness for her. His good humor was infectious and made everything pleasanter.
Does any one suppose that Burns would have sung as he did, had he been rich, respectable, and "kept a gig;" or Byron, if he had been a prosperous, happily-married Lord Privy Seal or Postmaster-General? Sometimes a heartbreak rouses an impassive nature to life. "What does he know," said a sage, "who has not suffered?" When Dumas asked Reboul, "What made you a poet?" his answer was, "Suffering!"
She was only twenty or twenty-two miles away, as the crow flies say half an hour's journey if one had the wings of a heron. He could rush home, jump into his gig, and send the horse at a gallop; he could get there by road or rail, somehow; he could telegraph, telling her not to go to bed, telling her to go to the station and wait for him there.
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