nine o'clock in the evening
`` What a lot of falsehoods the fellow told me about the meridians , the sun , and the moon . Nice sort of time we should keep if we listened to such as he . I was quite sure that the sun would regulate itself by my watch one of these days . '' Passe-partout did not know that if his watch had been divided into the twenty-four hours like Italian clocks , the hands would now show that it was nine o'clock in the evening instead of nine o'clock in the morning -- that is to say , the one-and-twentieth hour after midnight , which is the difference between London time and that at the 180th meridian . But this Passe-partout would not have acknowledged even if he understood it , and , in any case , if the detective had been on board . Passe-partout would have argued with him on any subject . Now , where was Fix at that moment ?