seven o'clock
TWO MAIDEN AUNTS ` Child , be mother to this child . ' -- E. B. BROWNING . It was seven o'clock on an autumn morning nearly a hundred years ago . A misty October morning , when the meadows looked grey with the heavy dew , and the sky was only just beginning to show pale blue through the haze which veiled it . There was a certain little hamlet , just a few cottages clustered together beside a country road , where the world seemed hardly yet awake . The road ran across a wide common , where the cows and horses and geese wandered about pretty much as they chose , and the blackberries grew as they grow only on waste ground .