twenty-nine minutes to nine
During the hours when he was not engrossed in verifying statistics , and appending references to those voluminous and still accumulating notes for the fifth volume of his great work , he devoted himself to sorting and arranging the odds and ends of facts and fancies that he found stored away in Miss Lady 's brain . Under ordinary circumstances he would have dismissed a pupil to whom clearness and accuracy were strangers , and whose attention wandered with every passing butterfly . In the classroom he not only demanded but practised order and system . He arrived at his conclusions by as methodical a series of mental actions as he arrived at his desk every morning at twenty-nine minutes to nine . But these were not ordinary circumstances . The impetuous young person who listened to him with such rapt admiration and respect , when she listened at all , had no method or system whatever . She simply waited for the hint , the flash that revealed the vision , then she joyously and fearlessly leaped to her conclusion .