About
nine o'clock
I regarded it as a brief holiday , permitted for once to work-weary faculties , rather than as an adventure of life and death . There is nothing like taking all you do at a moderate estimate : it keeps mind and body tranquil ; whereas grandiloquent notions are apt to hurry both into fever . Fifty miles were then a day 's journey -LRB- for I speak of a time gone by : my hair , which , till a late period , withstood the frosts of time , lies now , at last white , under a white cap , like snow beneath snow -RRB- . About nine o'clock of a wet February night I reached London . My reader , I know , is one who would not thank me for an elaborate reproduction of poetic first impressions ; and it is well , inasmuch as I had neither time nor mood to cherish such ; arriving as I did late , on a dark , raw , and rainy evening , in a Babylon and a wilderness , of which the vastness and the strangeness tried to the utmost any powers of clear thought and steady self-possession with which , in the absence of more brilliant faculties , Nature might have gifted me . When I left the coach , the strange speech of the cabmen and others waiting round , seemed to me odd as a foreign tongue . I had never before heard the English language chopped up in that way .