eight in the morning
Nobody knew why it should be considered such a hideous crime to be `` tardy , '' but the fact was that not the most reckless and insubordinate of the older boys cared to risk it . Any one of the four hundred children in any public school in the city preferred infinitely to be absent a day than to have the ghastly experience of walking through deserted streets -LRB- that is , with no children on them -RRB- , across the empty playground frighteningly unlike itself , into the long , desolate halls which , walk as cat-like as one might , resounded to the guilty footsteps with accusing echoes . And then the narrow cloakroom , haunted with limp , hanging coats and caps and hats , and finally the entry into the schoolroom , seated rank on rank with priggishly complacent schoolmates , looking up from their books with unfriendly eyes of blame at the figure of the late-comer . AH over that section of La Chance , during the hour between half-past seven and half-past eight in the morning , the families of school children were undergoing a most rigorous discipline in regularity and promptness . No child was too small or too timid to refrain from embittering his mother 's life with clamorous upbraidings if breakfast were late , or his school-outfit of clothes were not ready to the last button , so that he could join the procession of schoolward-bound children , already streaming past his door at a quarter past eight . The most easy-going and self-indulgent mother learned to have at least one meal a day on time ; and the children themselves during those eight years of their lives had imbedded in the tissue of their brains and the marrow of their bones that unrebelling habit of bending their backs daily to a regular burden of work not selected by themselves -- which , according to one 's point of view , is either the bane or the salvation of our modern industrial society . The region where the school stood was inhabited , for the most part , by American families or German and Irish ones so long established as to be virtually American ; a condition which was then not infrequent in moderate-sized towns of the Middle West and which is still by no means unknown there .