midnight
Taciturn in manner , he made few friends . His mind had a tendency toward contemplative inactivity . Of physical energy he had very little , and this may have been partly due to his infirmity . Late at night he would walk alone in the Strand : the teeming life of the city , and the mystery of its silence after midnight , had a strong fascination for him . In these rambles he came to know some of the strangest and oddest of the rags and rinsings of humanity : among them a Persian nobleman of the late shah 's household , who kept a small tobacco-shop at the corner of a by-street , and an old French exile , once of the court of Louis Phillippe , who sold the halfpenny papers . At other times he went out hardly at all , and was rarely invited . Only the housemate , who saw him at all times and in many moods , seemed to suspect that beneath that cold exterior there lay an ardent nature .