No car had yet come in sight, and so the contributor suggested that they should walk to the car-office, and look in the “Directory,” which is kept there, for the name of Hapford, in search of whom it had already been arranged that they should renew their acquaintance on the morrow.  Jonathan Tinker, when they had reached the office, heard with constitutional phlegm that the name of the Hapford for whom he inquired was not in the “Directory.”  “Never mind,” said the other; “come round to my house in the morning.  We’ll find him yet.”  So they parted with a shake of the hand, the second mate saying that he believed he should go down to the vessel and sleep aboard,—­if he could sleep,—­and murmuring at the last moment the hope of returning the compliment, while the other walked homeward, weary as to the flesh, but, in spite of his sympathy for Jonathan Tinker, very elate in spirit.  The truth is,—­and however disgraceful to human nature, let the truth still be told,—­he had recurred to his primal satisfaction in the man as calamity capable of being used for such and such literary ends, and, while he pitied him, rejoiced in him as an episode of real life quite as striking and complete as anything in fiction.  It was literature made to his hand.  Nothing could be better, he mused; and once more he passed the details of the story in review, and beheld all those pictures which the poor fellow’s artless words had so vividly conjured up:  he saw him leaping ashore in the gray summer dawn as soon as the ship hauled into the dock, and making his way, with his vague sea-legs unaccustomed to the pavements, up through the silent and empty city streets; he imagined the tumult of fear and hope which the sight of the man’s home must have caused in him, and the benumbing shock of finding it blind and deaf to all his appeals; he saw him sitting down upon what had been his own threshold, and waiting in a sort of bewildered patience till the neighbors should be awake, while the noises of the streets gradually 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.