midnight
He was as shy and awkward and nervous as ever in any affair that was not of some moral consequence to him . But as soon as he was convinced that a thing was right , he `` shut his eyes and ran and butted at it like a ram , '' as Captain James once expressed it , in talking over something Mr. Gray had done . People in the village said , `` they never knew what the parson would be at next ; '' or they might have said , `` where his reverence would next turn up . '' For I have heard of his marching right into the middle of a set of poachers , gathered together for some desperate midnight enterprise , or walking into a public-house that lay just beyond the bounds of my lady 's estate , and in that extra - parochial piece of ground I named long ago , and which was considered the rendezvous of all the ne'er - do-weel characters for miles round , and where a parson and a constable were held in much the same kind of esteem as unwelcome visitors . And yet Mr. Gray had his long fits of depression , in which he felt as if he were doing nothing , making no way in his work , useless and unprofitable , and better out of the world than in it . In comparison with the work he had set himself to do , what he did seemed to be nothing . I suppose it was constitutional , those attacks of lowness of spirits which he had about this time ; perhaps a part of the nervousness which made him always so awkward when he came to the Hall .