eleven o'clock
How many times since they had come back to him had he not pondered with a slow but deathless anger on the absence of a certain shirt , which he could have sworn had been amongst them . But now he lay in bed waiting to hear the clock go off , with his old bristly chin beneath the bedclothes , and his old discoloured nose above . He was thinking the thoughts which usually came into his mind about this hour -- that Mrs. Hughs ought not to scrape the butter off his bread for breakfast in the way she did ; that she ought to take that sixpence off his rent ; that the man who brought his late editions in the cart ought to be earlier , letting ` that man ' get his Pell Mells off before him , when he himself would be having the one chance of his day ; that , sooner than pay the ninepence which the bootmaker had proposed to charge for resoling him , he would wait until the summer came ` low class o ' feller ' as he was , he 'd be glad enough to sole him then for sixpence . And the high-souled critic , finding these reflections sordid , would have thought otherwise , perhaps , had he been standing on those feet -LRB- now twitching all by themselves beneath the bedclothes -RRB- up to eleven o'clock the night before , because there were still twelve numbers of the late edition that nobody would buy . No one knew more surely than Joshua Creed himself that , if he suffered himself to entertain any large and lofty views of life , he would infallibly find himself in that building to keep out of which he was in the habit of addressing to God his only prayer to speak of . Fortunately , from a boy up , together with a lengthy , oblong , square-jawed face , he had been given by Nature a single-minded view of life . In fact , the mysterious , stout tenacity of a soul born in the neighbourhood of Newmarket could not have been done justice to had he constitutionally seen -- any more than Mr. Stone himself -- two things at a time .