midnight
When I awoke next day , it was freezing hard , and the lowering sky threatened more snow . My breakfast cleared away , I drew my chair into its former place , and , with the fire getting so much the better of the landscape that I sat in twilight , resumed my Inn remembrances . That was a good Inn down in Wiltshire where I put up once , in the days of the hard Wiltshire ale , and before all beer was bitterness . It was on the skirts of Salisbury Plain , and the midnight wind that rattled my lattice window came moaning at me from Stonehenge . There was a hanger-on at that establishment -LRB- a supernaturally preserved Druid I believe him to have been , and to be still -RRB- , with long white hair , and a flinty blue eye always looking afar off ; who claimed to have been a shepherd , and who seemed to be ever watching for the reappearance , on the verge of the horizon , of some ghostly flock of sheep that had been mutton for many ages . He was a man with a weird belief in him that no one could count the stones of Stonehenge twice , and make the same number of them ; likewise , that any one who counted them three times nine times , and then stood in the centre and said , `` I dare ! '' would behold a tremendous apparition , and be stricken dead .