eight o'clock until six
I was momentarily sobered by the earnestness with which he brought home to me the relentlessness of our civilization . It seemed incredible . I should have learned a lesson in that store . Barring a few discordant days when the orders came in too fast or when we were short handed because of sickness , it was a veritable hive of happiness ; morning after morning clerks and porters arrived , pale , yet smiling , and laboured with cheerfulness from eight o'clock until six , and departed as cheerfully for modest homes in obscure neighbourhoods that seemed to me areas of exile . They were troubled with no visions of better things . When the travelling men came in from the `` road '' there was great hilarity . Important personages , these , looked up to by the city clerks ; jolly , reckless , Elizabethan-like rovers , who had tasted of the wine of liberty -- and of other wines with the ineradicable lust for the road in their blood .