twelve o'clock
Clinton had left his home at Cedar Run , Virginia , the evening before , had changed into a sleeper at Washington just before midnight , and reached New York very early this morning . From there , although he had until five in the afternoon to reach Brimfield Academy , he had departed after a breakfast eaten in the Terminal and had arrived at Brimfield at a little before nine . An hour had sufficed him to register and unpack his bag and trunk in the room assigned to him in Torrence Hall . Since that time -- and it was now almost twelve o'clock -- he had wandered about the school . He had peeped into the other dormitories and the recitation building , had explored the gymnasium from basement to trophy room and , finally , had loitered across the athletic field to the grand-stand , where , for the better part of an hour , he had been sitting in the sun , getting lonelier every minute . Clint -- everyone had always called him Clint and we might as well fall in line -- had never been farther north than Baltimore ; and today he felt himself not only a long way from home but in a country somehow strangely and uncomfortably alien . The few persons he had encountered had been quite civil to him , to be sure ; and the sunlight was the same sunlight that shone down on Cedar Run , but for all of that it seemed as if no one much cared where he was or what happened to him , and the air felt differently and the country looked different , and -- and , well , he rather wished himself back in Virginia !