midnight
A shot ! a yell ! silence ! Such , as soon as I could collect myself sufficiently to form an idea at all , were my midnight sensations as I sat up in my bed , with my chin on my knees , my hair on end , my body bedewed with cold perspiration , and my limbs trembling from the tips of my fingers to the points of my toes . I had been peacefully dreaming -- something about an automatic machine into which you might drop a Latin exercise and get it back faultlessly construed and written out . I had , in fact , got to the point of attempting nefariously to avail myself of its services . I had folded up the fiendish exercise on the passive subjunctive which Plummer had set us overnight , and was in the very act of consigning it to the mechanical crib , when the shot and the yell projected me , all of a heap , out of dreamland into the waking world .