midnight
Sometimes she could contain her happiness no longer ; and to view her good fortune in perspective , as it were , she would walk down to the fringe of the surf , and look back with welling eyes at the hen coop , the open-air kitchen , the sonorous pig-pen , and finally the boat itself , its bow and stern projecting from a maze of fences , cane-work and thatch , and painted a clean dazzling white like some bark of dream-land tossed by a hurricane into a barnyard . Not that life did not still have its hardships for her . She got little sleep . To begin with , she had to be up at sunrise every morning , and oftentimes , after midnight , when boats would make shore late or be leaving before dawn , the fishermen would start banging on her door and she would have to get up and serve them . These early morning sprees were the ones that made most money , though they caused her most uneasiness on the whole . She knew whom she was dealing with . Ashore for a few hours after a week at sea , those men wanted all the pleasures of land crowded into minutes of pure joy .