midnight
_ * * * * * Wherefore , also , beware and be warned in time , ye tenth transmitters of a foolish face , ye reckless begetters of diseased or puny bodies , with hearts and brains to match ! Far down the corridors of time shall club-footed retribution follow in your footsteps , and overtake you at every turn ! Most remorselessly , most vindictively , will you be aroused , in sleepless hours of unbearable misery -LRB- future-waking nightmares -RRB- , from your false , uneasy dream of death ; to participate in an inheritance of woe still worse than yours -- worse with all the accumulated interest of long years and centuries of iniquitous self-indulgence , and poisoned by the sting of a self-reproach that shall never cease till the last of your tainted progeny dies out , and finds his true nirvana , and yours , in the dim , forgetful depths of interstellar space ! * * * * * And here let me most conscientiously affirm that , partly from my keen sense of the solemnity of such an appeal , and the grave responsibility I take upon myself in making it ; but more especially in order to impress you , oh reader , with the full significance of this apocalyptic and somewhat minatory utterance -LRB- that it may haunt your finer sense during your midnight hours of introspective self-communion -RRB- , I have done my best , my very best , to couch it in the obscurest and most unintelligible phraseology I could invent . If I have failed to do this , if I have unintentionally made any part of my meaning clear , if I have once deviated by mistake into what might almost appear like sense -- mere common-sense -- it is the fault of my half-French and wholly imperfect education . I am but a poor scribe ! Thus roughly have I tried to give an account of this , the most important of our joint discoveries in the strange new world revealed to us by chance .