eleven o'clock
Because he liked the place , in which his health was rapidly restored to him , and because he conceived that he had passed through adventures enough for a man 's lifetime , he determined to settle there , and take up at last the profession of medicine from which he had , with so little profit , broken away . That is all his story , or so much of it as matters up to that night , six months later , when the battle of Sedgemoor was fought . Deeming the impending action no affair of his , as indeed it was not , and indifferent to the activity with which Bridgewater was that night agog , Mr. Blood closed his ears to the sounds of it , and went early to bed . He was peacefully asleep long before eleven o'clock , at which hour , as you know , Monmouth rode but with his rebel host along the Bristol Road , circuitously to avoid the marshland that lay directly between himself and the Royal Army . You also know that his numerical advantage -- possibly counter-balanced by the greater steadiness of the regular troops on the other side -- and the advantages he derived from falling by surprise upon an army that was more or less asleep , were all lost to him by blundering and bad leadership before ever he was at grips with Feversham . The armies came into collision in the neighbourhood of two o'clock in the morning . Mr. Blood slept undisturbed through the distant boom of cannon .