arose, and the wheels began to rattle over the stones, and the milk-man
and the ice-man came and went, and the waiting figure began to be stared
at, and to challenge the curiosity of the passing policeman; he fancied
the opening of the neighbor's door, and the slow, cold understanding of
the case; the manner, whatever it was, in which the sailor was told that
one year before his wife had died, with her babe, and that his children
were scattered, none knew where. As the contributor dwelt pityingly upon
these things, but at the same time estimated their aesthetic value one
by one, he drew near the head of his street, and found himself a few
paces behind a boy slouching onward through the night, to whom he called
out, adventurously, and with no real hope of information,--

"Do you happen to know anybody on this street by the name of Hapford?"

"Why, no, not in this town," said the boy; but he added that there was a
street of the same name in a neighboring suburb, and that there was a
Hapford living on it.

"By Jove!" thought the contributor, "this is more like literature than
ever"; and he hardly knew whether to be more provoked at his own
stupidity in not thinking of a street of the same name in the next
village, or delighted at the element of fatality which the fact
introduced into the story; for Tinker, according to his own account,
must have landed from the cars a few rods from the very door he was
seeking, and so walked farther and farther from it every moment. He
thought the case so curious, that he laid it briefly before the boy,
who, however he might have been inwardly affected, was sufficiently true
to the national traditions not to make the smallest conceivable outward
sign of concern in it.