three o'clock
I found this brown room of the Commons-house , with its green benches , and grilled galleries , so agreeable to my mood , that I went again the next morning , and listened to more records , till they tired me : for what I had was a prurient itch to hear secret scandals , and revelations of the festering heart , but these cylinders , gathered from a shop , divulged nothing . I then went out to make for Woolwich , but in the car saw the poet 's note-book in which I had written : and I took it , went back , and was writing an hour , till I was tired of that , too ; and judging it too late for Woolwich that day , wandered about the dusty committee-rooms and recesses of this considerable place . In one room another foolishness suddenly seized upon me , shewing how my slightest whim has become more imperious within me than all the Jaws of the Medes and Persians : for in that room , Committee Room No. 15 , I found an apparently young policeman lying flat on his back , who pleased me : his helmet tilted under his head , and near one white-gloved hand a blue official envelope ; the air of that stagnant quiet room was still perceptibly peach-scented , and he gave not the slightest odour that I could detect , though he had been corporal and stalwart , his face now the colour of dark ashes , in each hollow cheek a ragged hole about the size of a sixpence , the flimsy vaulted eye-lids well embedded in their caverns , from under whose fringe of eye-lash seemed whispered the word : ' _ Eternity . _ ' His hair seemed very long for a policeman , or perhaps it had grown since death ; but what interested me about him , was the envelope at his hand : for ` what , ' I asked myself , ` was this fellow doing here with an envelope at three o'clock on a Sunday afternoon ? ' This made me look closer , and then I saw by a mark at the left temple that he had been shot , or felled ; whereupon I was thrown into quite a great rage , for I thought that this poor man was killed in the execution of his duty , when many of his kind perhaps , and many higher than he , had fled their post to pray or riot . So , after looking at him a long time , I said to him : ` Well , D. 47 , you sleep very well : and you did well , dying so : I am pleased with you , and to mark my favour , I decree that you shall neither rot in the common air , nor burn in the common flames : for by my own hand shall you be distinguished with burial . ' And this wind so possessed me , that I at once went out : with the crow-bar from the car I broke the window of a near iron-monger 's in Parliament Street , got a spade , and went into Westminster Abbey .