midnight
The room was furnished with a bed , a chair that was always threatening to come to pieces and a desk with weak carved legs . In this room sat McGregor night after night striving to realise his Coal Creek dream of training his mind and making himself of some account in the world . From seven-thirty until nine-thirty he sat at a desk in a night school . From ten until midnight he read in his room . He did not think of his surroundings , of the vast disorder of life about him , but tried with all his strength to bring something like order and purpose into his own mind and his own life . In the little court under the window lay heaps of discarded newspaper tossed about by the wind . There in the heart of the city , walled in by the brick warehouse and half concealed under piles of chair legs cans and broken bottles , lay two logs in their time no doubt , a part of the grove that once lay about the house .