midnight
`` And tell me this , so that my last shred of doubt will be cleared away ; why did you decide that he was from Virginia ? '' `` It was very faint , I admit , '' answered Shamrock Jolnes , `` but no trained observer could have failed to detect the odour of mint in the car . '' New York City , they said , was deserted ; and that accounted , doubtless , for the sounds carrying so far in the tranquil summer air . The breeze was south-by-southwest ; the hour was midnight ; the theme was a bit of feminine gossip by wireless mythology . Three hundred and sixty-five feet above the heated asphalt the tiptoeing symbolic deity on Manhattan pointed her vacillating arrow straight , for the time , in the direction of her exalted sister on Liberty Island . The lights of the great Garden were out ; the benches in the Square were filled with sleepers in postures so strange that beside them the writhing figures in Dore 's illustrations of the Inferno would have straightened into tailor 's dummies . The statue of Diana on the tower of the Garden -- its constancy shown by its weathercock ways , its innocence by the coating of gold that it has acquired , its devotion to style by its single , graceful flying scarf , its candour and artlessness by its habit of ever drawing the long bow , its metropolitanism by its posture of swift flight to catch a Harlem train -- remained poised with its arrow pointed across the upper bay .