four o'clock in the afternoon
But when the light does come , my dear , it 'll be a flash o ' blue flame , with a smell o ' something burnin ' ! '' The woman covered her face with her hands , and swayed back and forth where she stood . Then MacNutt held back his guttural laugh , suddenly , for she had fallen forward on her face , in a dead faint . It was at least four o'clock in the afternoon -- as the janitor of the building later reported to the police -- when a Postal-Union lineman , carrying a well-worn case of tools , made his way up through the halls and stairways of one of those many Italian apartment houses just south of Washington Square and west of Broadway . This lineman worked on the roof , apparently , for some twenty minutes . Then he came down again , chatted for a while with the janitor in the basement , and giving him a cigar , borrowed an eight-foot step-ladder , for the purpose of scaling some twelve feet of brick wall , where the adjoining office building towered its additional story above the apartment-house roof . If the janitor had been less averse to mounting his five flights of stairway , or less indifferent as to the nature of the work which took the busy telegraph official up to his roof , he might , that afternoon , have witnessed both a delicate and an interesting electrical operation .