midnight
To play this card required a prodigious amount of travelling about the district ; and between these activities and the speaking engagements he was in promise bound to fulfil , Shelby saw little or nothing of New Babylon till midnight of Saturday , which was the virtual end of the canvass . Seen again , as he viewed it now , the town would look raw and provincial despite patriotic throes of self-deception . On moonlit nights the New Babylon Electric Light and Power Company hoarded its energies , and an inky pall accordingly lay over the muddy streets which the pale melon rind in the clouded zenith did nothing to dissipate . The contrast between this niggardliness and the midnight brilliance of up-town Broadway was inevitable , and the jolting Tuscarora House free ` bus came readily into unflattering comparison with a certain rubber-tired hansom cab . Naturally midnight , a jaded body , and the Tuscarora House free ` bus might well jaundice any scene ; but the returning native recognized these as accidents merely in the phenomenon of his changed vision . The hotel bar-room was boisterous with the usual Saturday night gathering of the set which in its innocence supposed itself fast , and the maturer poker crowd , Shelby 's own cronies , was in protracted session elsewhere in the building ; but he managed to evade them all and lock himself in his ugly room . For some sophisticated weeks he had suspected the household gods here assembled to have feet of clay .