four o'clock
-LRB- We seem to have spent a large portion of that twenty-four hours urging each other to go to bed . -RRB- Then I went back to work . Polling had been brisk during the dinner-hour , and both Cash and Robin considered that we were doing fairly well . Things would be slack at Stoneleigh itself during the afternoon , and the obvious and politic course now was to drive over to the fishing village of Hunnable -- I had only time for one , and this was the most considerable -- and catch my marine constituents as they emerged from the ocean , Proteus-like , between three and four o'clock . I did so , and for the space of an hour and a half I solicited the patronage of innumerable tarry mariners , until their horny hands had filled up the voting-papers and my own smelt to heaven of fish . It was a quarter to five , and dark , before I escaped from the attentions of a small but pertinacious group of inquirers who wanted to understand my exact attitude on the question of trawling within the three-mile limit , and proceeded at a hand-gallop back to Stoneleigh . -LRB- That odoriferous but popular vehicle , the motor-car , was still in the preceded-by-a-man-ten-yards-in-front-bearing-a-red-flag stage in those days , and we had to rely on that antiquated but much more reliable medium of transport , the horse . -RRB-