midnight
And these were bitter hard days for poor Sally , and mainly delivered up to private crying . She kept her furniture pretty damp , and so caught cold , and the dampness and the cold and the sorrow together undermined her appetite , and she was a pitiful enough object , poor thing . Her state was bad enough , as per statement of it above quoted ; but all the forces of nature and circumstance seemed conspiring to make it worse -- and succeeding . For instance , the morning after her dismissal of Tracy , Hawkins and Sellers read in the associated press dispatches that a toy puzzle called Pigs in the Clover , had come into sudden favor within the past few weeks , and that from the Atlantic to the Pacific all the populations of all the States had knocked off work to play with it , and that the business of the country had now come to a standstill by consequence ; that judges , lawyers , burglars , parsons , thieves , merchants , mechanics , murderers , women , children , babies -- everybody , indeed , could be seen from morning till midnight , absorbed in one deep project and purpose , and only one -- to pen those pigs , work out that puzzle successfully ; that all gayety , all cheerfulness had departed from the nation , and in its place care , preoccupation and anxiety sat upon every countenance , and all faces were drawn , distressed , and furrowed with the signs of age and trouble , and marked with the still sadder signs of mental decay and incipient madness ; that factories were at work night and day in eight cities , and yet to supply the demand for the puzzle was thus far impossible . Hawkins was wild with joy , but Sellers was calm . Small matters could not disturb his serenity . He said -- `` That 's just the way things go .