ten o'clock
There they stumbled upon a little bookseller 's shop blinking in a quiet corner , and bought three or four guides and small histories of Ansbach , which they carried home , and studied between drowsing and waking . The wonderful German syntax seems at its most enigmatical in this sort of literature , and sometimes they lost themselves in its labyrinths completely , and only made their way perilously out with the help of cumulative declensions , past articles and adjectives blindly seeking their nouns , to long-procrastinated verbs dancing like swamp-fires in the distance . They emerged a little less ignorant than they went in , and better qualified than they would otherwise have been for their second visit to the Schloss , which they paid early the next morning . They were so early , indeed , that when they mounted from the great inner court , much too big for Ansbach , if not for the building , and rung the custodian 's bell , a smiling maid who let them into an ante-room , where she kept on picking over vegetables for her dinner , said the custodian was busy , and could not be seen till ten o'clock . She seemed , in her nook of the pretentious pile , as innocently unconscious of its history as any hen-sparrow who had built her nest in some coign of its architecture ; and her friendly , peaceful domesticity remained a wholesome human background to the tragedies and comedies of the past , and held them in a picturesque relief in which they were alike tolerable and even charming . The history of Ansbach strikes its roots in the soil of fable , and above ground is a gnarled and twisted growth of good and bad from the time of the Great Charles to the time of the Great Frederick . Between these times she had her various rulers , ecclesiastical and secular , in various forms of vassalage to the empire ; but for nearly four centuries her sovereignty was in the hands of the margraves , who reigned in a constantly increasing splendor till the last sold her outright to the King of Prussia in 1791 , and went to live in England on the proceeds .