nine
o'clock
Artists would find a paradise of queer , cozy gables , and corners of gardens crowded with old-fashioned flowers that matter more than all the ancient books in the museum library . They would remember Easthampton for the green velvet moss and golden lichen on its ancient roofs , the faint rainbow tints in the old , old glass of its tiny window-panes ; for the pink hollyhocks painted against backgrounds of dove-gray shingles ; for its sky of peculiar hyacinth blue like a vast cup inverted over wide-stretching golden sands . They would remember gray windmills striding along those sands like a procession of tall monks with arms lifted in benediction ; whereas the summer girls and their summer young men would think of the charming , glorified cottages with their awnings and verandas and lovely lawns and masses of blue and pink hydrangeas ; also of the big and jolly hotel where we are staying to-night . -LRB- The Hamptons would n't have done for _ them _ in old days when men and maids -- `` persons of the younger sort '' -- were hauled up before the courts if they were out after nine o'clock ! -RRB- While the picture for children would be of a shining beach smooth as silk , and immense lengths of white waves , marching rank after rank in an endless army , with deep rolling music of unseen drums . You may take your choice of these Hamptons , or like me you may say , `` I 'll have them all , please ! '' Anyhow , you enter beside the Great Pond I told you of , which is so charming in itself and in its flat frame of village green that it deserves the capital G and P it 's always spelt with .