noon
At the noon hour , when Jim had gone to his boarding-house , he was alone , and if no one came in , he was happy . It seemed to him the best time of the day . Every few minutes he went to the front door to look out . The quiet Main Street , on which his shop had faced since he was a young man just come home from his trade adventures , and which had always been such a sleepy place at the noon hour in the summer , was now like a battle-field from which an army had retreated . A great gash had been cut in the street where the new sewer was to be laid . Swarms of workingmen , most of them strangers , had come into Main Street from the factories by the railroad tracks . They stood in groups in lower Main Street by Wymer 's tobacco store .