ten o'clock
Whether you are asleep or awake he will attack you , caring nothing for the fact that in bulk and strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth to a sucking child ; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the very lap of peril and the immediate presence of death , and yet is no more afraid than is the man who walks the streets of a city that was threatened by an earthquake ten centuries before . When we speak of Clive , Nelson , and Putnam as men who `` did n't know what fear was , '' we ought always to add the flea -- and put him at the head of the procession . -- Pudd ` nhead Wilson 's Calendar . Judge Driscoll was in bed and asleep by ten o'clock on Friday night , and he was up and gone a-fishing before daylight in the morning with his friend Pembroke Howard . These two had been boys together in Virginia when that State still ranked as the chief and most imposing member of the Union , and they still coupled the proud and affectionate adjective `` old '' with her name when they spoke of her . In Missouri a recognized superiority attached to any person who hailed from Old Virginia ; and this superiority was exalted to supremacy when a person of such nativity could also prove descent from the First Families of that great commonwealth . The Howards and Driscolls were of this aristocracy .