midnight
The trumpet-blast , winding cheerily from afar off , recalled him to the truth ; summoned him sharply back from vain regrets to the facts of daily life . It waked him as it wakes a sleeping charger ; it roused him as it rouses a wounded trooper . He stood hearkening to the familiar music till it had died away -- spirited , yet still lingering ; full of fire , yet fading softly down the wind . He listened till the last echo ceased ; then he tore the paper that he held in strips , and let it float away , drifting down the yellow current of the reedy river channel ; and he half drew from its scabbard the saber whose blade had been notched and dented and stained in many midnight skirmishes and many headlong charges under the desert suns , and looked at it as though a friend 's eye gazed at him in the gleam of the trusty steel . And his soldier-like philosophy , his campaigner 's carelessness , his habitual , easy negligence that had sometimes been weak as water and sometimes heroic as martyrdom , came back to him with a deeper shadow on it , that was grave with a calm , resolute , silent courage . `` So best after all , perhaps , '' he said half aloud , in the solitude of the ruined and abandoned mosque . `` He can not well come to shipwreck with such a fair wind and such a smooth sea .