Chapter 10

X

Mr. Hawkins proved himself worthy of his wife's faith in his
capacity. He learned from Ann Eliza as much as she could tell him
about Mrs. Hochmuller and returned the next evening with a scrap of
paper bearing her address, beneath which Johnny (the family scribe)
had written in a large round hand the names of the streets that led
there from the ferry.

Ann Eliza lay awake all that night, repeating over and over
again the directions Mr. Hawkins had given her. He was a kind man,
and she knew he would willingly have gone with her to Hoboken;
indeed she read in his timid eye the half-formed intention of
offering to accompany her--but on such an errand she preferred to
go alone.

The next Sunday, accordingly, she set out early, and without
much trouble found her way to the ferry. Nearly a year had passed
since her previous visit to Mrs. Hochmuller, and a chilly April
breeze smote her face as she stepped on the boat. Most of the
passengers were huddled together in the cabin, and Ann Eliza shrank
into its obscurest corner, shivering under the thin black mantle
which had seemed so hot in July. She began to feel a little
bewildered as she stepped ashore, but a paternal policeman put her
into the right car, and as in a dream she found herself retracing
the way to Mrs. Hochmuller's door. She had told the conductor the
name of the street at which she wished to get out, and presently
she stood in the biting wind at the corner near the beer-saloon,
where the sun had once beat down on her so fiercely. At length an
empty car appeared, its yellow flank emblazoned with the name of
Mrs. Hochmuller's suburb, and Ann Eliza was presently jolting past
the narrow brick houses islanded between vacant lots like giant
piles in a desolate lagoon. When the car reached the end of its
journey she got out and stood for some time trying to remember
which turn Mr. Ramy had taken. She had just made up her mind to
ask the car-driver when he shook the reins on the backs of his lean
horses, and the car, still empty, jogged away toward Hoboken.

Ann Eliza, left alone by the roadside, began to move
cautiously forward, looking about for a small red house with a
gable overhung by an elm-tree; but everything about her seemed
unfamiliar and forbidding. One or two surly looking men slouched
past with inquisitive glances, and she could not make up her mind
to stop and speak to them.

At length a tow-headed boy came out of a swinging door
suggestive of illicit conviviality, and to him Ann Eliza ventured
to confide her difficulty. The offer of five cents fired him with
an instant willingness to lead her to Mrs. Hochmuller, and he was
soon trotting past the stone-cutter's yard with Ann Eliza in his wake.