nine o'clock
The inferior members of the court party , in times of high political excitement , led scarcely a more desirable life . These remarks may serve as a preface to the following adventures , which chanced upon a summer night , not far from a hundred years ago . The reader , in order to avoid a long and dry detail of colonial affairs , is requested to dispense with an account of the train of circumstances that had caused much temporary inflammation of the popular mind . It was near nine o'clock of a moonlight evening , when a boat crossed the ferry with a single passenger , who had obtained his conveyance at that unusual hour by the promise of an extra fare . While he stood on the landing-place , searching in either pocket for the means of fulfilling his agreement , the ferryman lifted a lantern , by the aid of which , and the newly risen moon , he took a very accurate survey of the stranger 's figure . He was a youth of barely eighteen years , evidently country-bred , and now , as it should seem , upon his first visit to town . He was clad in a coarse gray coat , well worn , but in excellent repair ; his under garments were durably constructed of leather , and fitted tight to a pair of serviceable and well-shaped limbs ; his stockings of blue yarn were the incontrovertible work of a mother or a sister ; and on his head was a three-cornered hat , which in its better days had perhaps sheltered the graver brow of the lad 's father .