midnight
All the furniture being fixed , the books shelved , and the nails driven , he had begun to sit in his parlour during the dark winter nights and re-attempt some of his old studies -- one branch of which had included Roman-Britannic antiquities -- an unremunerative labour for a national school-master but a subject , that , after his abandonment of the university scheme , had interested him as being a comparatively unworked mine ; practicable to those who , like himself , had lived in lonely spots where these remains were abundant , and were seen to compel inferences in startling contrast to accepted views on the civilization of that time . A resumption of this investigation was the outward and apparent hobby of Phillotson at present -- his ostensible reason for going alone into fields where causeways , dykes , and tumuli abounded , or shutting himself up in his house with a few urns , tiles , and mosaics he had collected , instead of calling round upon his new neighbours , who for their part had showed themselves willing enough to be friendly with him . But it was not the real , or the whole , reason , after all . Thus on a particular evening in the month , when it had grown quite late -- to near midnight , indeed -- and the light of his lamp , shining from his window at a salient angle of the hill-top town over infinite miles of valley westward , announced as by words a place and person given over to study , he was not exactly studying . The interior of the room -- the books , the furniture , the schoolmaster 's loose coat , his attitude at the table , even the flickering of the fire , bespoke the same dignified tale of undistracted research -- more than creditable to a man who had had no advantages beyond those of his own making . And yet the tale , true enough till latterly , was not true now . What he was regarding was not history .