midnight
He was very anxious to keep that , but also he wanted more . There were neither books nor any seat nor corner in that house where reading was possible , no newspaper ever brought the clash of worldly things into its heavenward seclusion ; horror of it all grew in me daily , and whenever I could I escaped into the streets and tramped about Chatham . The news shops appealed to me particularly . One saw there smudgy illustrated sheets , the Police News in particular , in which vilely drawn pictures brought home to the dullest intelligence an interminable succession of squalid crimes , women murdered and put into boxes , buried under floors , old men bludgeoned at midnight by robbers , people thrust suddenly out of trains , happy lovers shot , vitrioled and so forth by rivals . I got my first glimpse of the life of pleasure in foully drawn pictures of `` police raids '' on this and that . Interspersed with these sheets were others in which Sloper , the urban John Bull , had his fling with gin bottle and obese umbrella , or the kindly empty faces of the Royal Family appeared and reappeared , visiting this , opening that , getting married , getting offspring , lying in state , doing everything but anything , a wonderful , good-meaning , impenetrable race apart . I have never revisited Chatham ; the impression it has left on my mind is one of squalid compression , unlit by any gleam of a maturer charity .