three o’clock
They had secured the large parlor of the hotel , where the young people danced in the evening , and where entertainments were held , of the sort usually given in summer hotels ; we had already had a dramatic reading , a time with the phonograph , an exhibition of necromancy , a concert by a college glee club , and I do not know what else . The room would hold perhaps two hundred people , if they were closely seated , and , by her own showing , Mrs. Makely had sold above two hundred and fifty tickets and chances . All Saturday forenoon she consoled herself with the belief that a great many people at the other hotels and cottages had bought seats merely to aid the cause , and would not really come ; she estimated that at least fifty would stay away ; but , if Reuben Camp had sold his tickets among the natives , we might expect every one of them to come and get his money 's worth ; she did not dare to ask the head-waiter how he had got rid of his twenty-five tickets . The hour set for the Talk to begin was three o'clock , so that people could have their naps comfortably over , after the one o'clock dinner , and be just in the right frame of mind for listening . But long before the appointed time the people who dine at twelve , and never take an afternoon nap , began to arrive , on foot , in farm-wagons , smart buggies , mud-crusted carryalls , and all manner of ramshackle vehicles . They arrived as if coming to a circus , old husbands and wives , young couples and their children , pretty girls and their fellows , and hitched their horses to the tails of their wagons , and began to make a picnic lunch in the shadow of the grove lying between the hotel and the station . About two we heard the snorting of a locomotive at a time when no train was due , and a construction train came in view , with the men waving their handkerchiefs from the windows , and apparently ready for all the fun there was to be in the thing .