noon
They were as simply a part of his natural circumstance as the large cottonwood-tree which hung over the river from a point near by , and which seemed to have always an oriole singing in it . All along there the banks were rather steep , and to him they looked very high . The blue clay that formed them was full of springs , which the boys dammed up in little ponds and let loose in glassy falls upon their flutter-mills . As with everything that boys do , these mills were mostly failures ; the pins which supported the wheels were always giving way ; and though there were instances of boys who started their wheels at recess and found them still fluttering away at noon when they came out of school , none ever carried his enterprise so far as to spin the cotton blowing from the balls of the cottonwood-tree by the shore , as they all meant to do . They met such disappointments with dauntless cheerfulness , and lightly turned from some bursting bubble to some other where the glory of the universe was still mirrored . The river shore was strewn not only with waste cotton , but with drift which the water had made porous , and which they called smoke-wood . They made cigars for their own use out of it , and it seemed to them that it might be generally introduced as a cheap and simple substitute for tobacco ; but they never got any of it into the market , not even the market of that world where the currency was pins .