That night we slept in a single bed, Hawkins and I, in a cheap lodging-house--that is, _he_ slept a sordid, drunken sleep, while I lay tossing and cursing my fate until, burning with fever, I rose and drained part of the water in the pitcher. Yet, in the early morning hours there came to me the first ray of hope throughout that dreary space since I had left New York--the Quirks! The Quirks! Twenty years had passed since I had heard from them. They might be dead and gone long ago without my knowing it; yet, were they alive, I felt that one or other of them would hold out a friendly hand for auld lang syne. Before daybreak, I stole forth, hired a horse and buggy, asked the way to Methuen and, rousing Hawkins, bundled him, whining and fretting, into it. Slowly we drove in the growing light through the country lanes I had known and loved so well as a lad--the farmland which was the only friendly thing in my disconsolate boyhood. It was in the early spring and the apple-trees along the stone walls by the roadside were showered with clustering blossoms. Dandelions sprinkled the fields. The cloud shadows slowly moved across rich pastures of delicate green. A sun-warmed, perfume-laden breeze blew from the east, tinged with a keen edge that sent the blood leaping in my temples. Tiny pools stood in the ruts glinting blue toward the sky. The old horse plodded slowly on and the robins called among the elms that stood arching over white farm-houses with blinds, some blue, some green. With a harrowing sense of helplessness, the realization of what I had thrown away of life swept over me. I turned from the sodden creature beside me in disgust. Hawkins had slumped back in his seat, so that his head rested upon the hood, and had fallen sound asleep, with his mouth wide open. How I wished that I had the courage to strangle him--and then it came to me that, after all, it was not he who had ruined me, but I who had ruined him! About noontime we came to a landscape that seemed familiar to me, although more heavily wooded and with many more farms than I remembered; and at a turn in the road I recognized a couple of huge elms that marked the site of the homestead occupied in my boyhood by the Quirks. There was the brook, the maple grove upon the hill, the old stile by the pasture, and the long stone wall beside the apple orchard, radiant with white. Yet the house seemed to have vanished. My heart sank, for somehow I had assumed that the Quirks must still be living, just as they had always lived. And now, as we drew near the turn, I saw that the place where the homestead had stood was empty, and all that remained was a heap of blackened stone and brick thickly overgrown with brambles.