nearly twelve o'clock
Let the hounds of God , not of Satan , loose upon sin ; -- God only can rule the dogs of the devil ; -- let them hunt it to the earth ; let them drag forth the demoniac to the feet of the Man who loved the people while he let the devil take their swine ; and do not talk about disgrace from a thing being known when the disgrace is that the thing should exist . One night I was returning home from some poor attempts of my own . I had now been a pupil of Falconer for a considerable time , but having my own livelihood to make , I could not do so much as I would . It was late , nearly twelve o'clock , as I passed through the region of Seven Dials . Here and there stood three or four brutal-looking men , and now and then a squalid woman with a starveling baby in her arms , in the light of the gin-shops . The babies were the saddest to see -- nursery-plants already in training for the places these men and women now held , then to fill a pauper 's grave , or perhaps a perpetual cell -- say rather , for the awful spaces of silence , where the railway director can no longer be guilty of a worse sin than house-breaking , and his miserable brother will have no need of the shelter of which he deprived him . Now and then a flaunting woman wavered past -- a night-shade , as our old dramatists would have called her .