but they didn't know how to get at it, and what could a parcel of
children do? Julia's a good girl, and when I find her I'm all right."

The writer could only repeat that there was no Mr. Hapford living on
that street, and never had been, so far as he knew. Yet there might be
such a person in the neighborhood: and they would go out together and
ask at some of the houses about. But the stranger must first take a
glass of wine; for he looked used up.

The sailor awkwardly but civilly enough protested that he did not want
to give so much trouble, but took the glass, and, as he put it to his
lips, said formally, as if it were a toast or a kind of grace, "I hope I
may have the opportunity of returning the compliment." The contributor
thanked him; though, as he thought of all the circumstances of the case,
and considered the cost at which the stranger had come to enjoy his
politeness, he felt little eagerness to secure the return of the
compliment at the same price, and added, with the consequence of another
set phrase, "Not at all." But the thought had made him the more anxious
to befriend the luckless soul fortune had cast in his way; and so the
two sallied out together, and rang doorbells wherever lights were still
seen burning in the windows, and asked the astonished people who
answered their summons whether any Mr. Hapford were known to live in the
neighborhood.

And although the search for this gentleman proved vain, the contributor
could not feel that an expedition which set familiar objects in such
novel lights was altogether a failure. He entered so intimately into the
cares and anxieties of his protégé that at times he felt himself in some
inexplicable sort a shipmate of Jonathan Tinker, and almost personally a
partner of his calamities. The estrangement of all things which takes