twelve o'clock
For our whole town , and almost every man 's bread and butter , rose and fell with the industry or the idleness of our great iron manufactories . To my mind , the cause of the trouble was twofold : first , that the proprietors were very rich ; and second , that the agitators were very scoundrels . For we had as happy a class of working men in New Jedboro , take them on the whole , as the God of work looked down upon . They were in receipt of fair and considerable wages , their shops were clean and well ventilated , and their hours reasonably short , especially if compared to those poor creatures whom greed and selfishness keep behind the counters till twelve o'clock on a Saturday night . And I have noticed that those who howl the loudest about long hours are those who postpone their shopping till ten or eleven of these same Saturday nights . For the most part , they owned their own homes and the plots of ground they gardened , and I do contend that the watering-can and the spade and the pruning knife are a means of grace . Very many of them made twelve shillings a day , which is three dollars in our good Canadian money , and some of the highest paid made twice as much .