about half past five
* * * * * When they found Anse Dugmore in his ambush another snow had fallen on his back and he was slightly more of a skeleton than ever ; but the bony finger was still crooked about the trigger , the rusted hammer was back at full cock and there was a dried brownish stain on the gun stock . So , from these facts , his finders were moved to conclude that the freed convict must have bled to death from his lungs before the sheriff ever passed , which they held to be a good thing all round and a lucky thing for the sheriff . There was a sound , heard in the early hours of a Sunday morning , that used to bother strangers in our town until they got used to it . It started usually along about half past five or six o'clock and it kept up interminably -- so it seemed to them -- a monotonous , jarring thump-thump , thump-thump that was like the far-off beating of African tomtoms ; but at breakfast , when the beaten biscuits came upon the table , throwing off a steamy hot halo of their own goodness , these aliens knew what it was that had roused them , and , unless they were dyspeptics by nature , felt amply recompensed for the lost hours of their beauty sleep . In these degenerate latter days I believe there is a machine that accomplishes the same purpose noiselessly by a process of rolling and crushing , which no doubt is efficacious ; but it seems somehow to take the poetry out of the operation . Old Judge Priest , our circuit judge , and the reigning black deity of his kitchen , Aunt Dilsey Turner , would have naught of it . So long as his digestion survived and her good right arm held out to endure , there would be real beaten biscuits for the judge 's Sunday morning breakfast .