nine o'clock
The boughs cast green shades , which hurt the complexion of the girls who walked there ; and a fringe of them which overhung Mr. Melbury 's garden dripped on his seed-plots when it rained , pitting their surface all over as with pock-marks , till Melbury declared that gardens in such a place were no good at all . The two trees that had creaked all the winter left off creaking , the whir of the night-jar , however , forming a very satisfactory continuation of uncanny music from that quarter . Except at mid-day the sun was not seen complete by the Hintock people , but rather in the form of numerous little stars staring through the leaves . Such an appearance it had on Midsummer Eve of this year , and as the hour grew later , and nine o'clock drew on , the irradiation of the daytime became broken up by weird shadows and ghostly nooks of indistinctness . Imagination could trace upon the trunks and boughs strange faces and figures shaped by the dying lights ; the surfaces of the holly-leaves would here and there shine like peeping eyes , while such fragments of the sky as were visible between the trunks assumed the aspect of sheeted forms and cloven tongues . This was before the moonrise . Later on , when that planet was getting command of the upper heaven , and consequently shining with an unbroken face into such open glades as there were in the neighborhood of the hamlet , it became apparent that the margin of the wood which approached the timber-merchant 's premises was not to be left to the customary stillness of that reposeful time .