two o'clock
`` You -- find -- dad -- nize ? '' Frowenfeld replied that it had been left by the oversight of a customer , and expressed a liking for its odor . `` I sand you , '' said the landlord , -- a speech whose meaning Frowenfeld was not sure of until the next morning , when a small , nearly naked black boy , who could not speak a word of English , brought to the apothecary a luxuriant bunch of this basil , growing in a rough box . On the twenty-fourth day of December , 1803 , at two o'clock , P.M. , the thermometer standing at 79 , hygrometer 17 , barometer 29.880 , sky partly clouded , wind west , light , the apothecary of the rue Royale , now something more than a month established in his calling , might have been seen standing behind his counter and beginning to show embarrassment in the presence of a lady , who , since she had got her prescription filled and had paid for it , ought in the conventional course of things to have hurried out , followed by the pathetically ugly black woman who tarried at the door as her attendant ; for to be in an apothecary 's shop at all was unconventional . She was heavily veiled ; but the sparkle of her eyes , which no multiplication of veils could quite extinguish , her symmetrical and well-fitted figure , just escaping smallness , her grace of movement , and a soft , joyous voice , had several days before led Frowenfeld to the confident conclusion that she was young and beautiful . For this was now the third time she had come to buy ; and , though the purchases were unaccountably trivial , the purchaser seemed not so . On the two previous occasions she had been accompanied by a slender girl , somewhat taller than she , veiled also , of graver movement , a bearing that seemed to Joseph almost too regal , and a discernible unwillingness to enter or tarry .