three o'clock
And the French , by easy-going ways , stimulate that sense of security ; we had heard weird stories of boat-drills at daybreak , of midnight alarms and of passengers sleeping on deck in their life preservers , and we were prepared for the thrills which Wichita and Emporia expected us to have . They never came . One afternoon , seven or eight days out , we had notice at noon that we would try on our life preservers that afternoon . The life preservers were thrown on our beds by the stewards and at three o'clock each passenger appeared beside the life-boat assigned to him , donned his life-belt which gave him a ridiculously stuffed appearance , answered to a roll-call , guyed those about him after the manner of old friends , and waited for something else . It never came . The ship 's officers gradually faded from the decks and the passengers , after standing around foolishly for a time , disappeared one by one into their cabins and bloomed out again with their life-belts moulted ! That was the last we heard of the boat-drill or the life-belts .