half past four
In the German quarter , to the north , one felt a sort of ornamental bleakness -- if the expression may be permitted : the tenements here were clean and not too crowded , the scroll-work on their superimposed porches , like that decorating the Turnverein and the stem Lutheran Church , was eloquent of a Teutonic inheritance : The Belgians were to the west , beyond the base-ball park and the car barns , their grey houses scattered among new streets beside the scarred and frowning face of Torrey 's hill . Almost under the hill itself , which threatened to roll down on it , and facing a bottomless , muddy street , was the quaint little building giving the note of foreign thrift , of socialism and shrewdness , of joie de vivre to the settlement , the Franco-Belgian co-operative store , with its salle de reunion above and a stage for amateur theatricals . Standing in the mud outside , Janet would gaze through the tiny windows in the stucco wall at the baskets prepared for each household laid in neat rows beside the counter ; at the old man with the watery blue eyes and lacing of red in his withered cheeks who spoke no English , whose duty it was to distribute the baskets to the women and children as they called . Turning eastward again , one came to Dey Street , in the heart of Hampton , where Hibernian Hall stood alone and grim , sole testimony of the departed Hibernian glories of a district where the present Irish rulers of the city had once lived and gossiped and fought in the days when the mill bells had roused the boarding-house keepers at half past four of a winter morning . Beside the hall was a corner lot , heaped high with hills of ashes and rubbish like the vomitings of some filthy volcano ; the unsightliness of which was half concealed by huge signs announcing the merits of chewing gums , tobaccos , and cereals . But why had the departure of the Irish , the coming of the Syrians made Dey Street dark , narrow , mysterious , oriental ? changed the very aspect of its architecture ?