midnight
I wish you a good-night , sir , and beg pardon for stopping you . '' And so he slipt away ; and , as he did not show himself the next morning , it was only through subsequent events that I ever arrived at a plausible conjecture as to what his business could have been . Arriving at my room , I threw a lump of cannel coal upon the grate , lighted a cigar , and spent an hour in musings of every hue , from the brightest to the most sombre ; being , in truth , not so very confident as at some former periods that this final step , which would mix me up irrevocably with the Blithedale affair , was the wisest that could possibly be taken . It was nothing short of midnight when I went to bed , after drinking a glass of particularly fine sherry on which I used to pride myself in those days . It was the very last bottle ; and I finished it , with a friend , the next forenoon , before setting out for Blithedale . There can hardly remain for me -LRB- who am really getting to be a frosty bachelor , with another white hair , every week or so , in my mustache -RRB- , there can hardly flicker up again so cheery a blaze upon the hearth , as that which I remember , the next day , at Blithedale . It was a wood fire , in the parlor of an old farmhouse , on an April afternoon , but with the fitful gusts of a wintry snowstorm roaring in the chimney .