six o'clock
Again a confusion of journeyings , and afterwards quiet settlement in a red brick box of a house in a mill town on the Merrimac . He could still hear the clang of the mill-gates , the ringing of the bells , the hum and whir and roar of a hundred thousand spindles , the clacking crash of the ponderous shifting frames . He could still see with the inner eye the hundreds of windows blazing in the reflected fires of the western sun , or twinkling with numberless lights that cast their long reflections on the black waters of the canal . There on the bank , at the entrance to the footbridge , the boy was wont to take his stand regularly at six o'clock of a winter 's day , and wait for the hoisting of the mill-gates and the coming of his father and mother with the throng of toilers . So he saw himself -- himself as an identity emerging at last from the confusion of time and place and circumstance ; for there followed the public school , the joys of rivalry , the eager outrush for the boy 's Ever New , the glory of scrimmage and school-boy sports , the battle royal for the little Auvergnat when taunted with the epithet `` Johnny Frog '' by the belligerent youth , American born , and the victorious outcome for the `` foreigner '' ; the Auvergne blood was up , and the temperament volcanic like his native soil where subterranean heats evidence themselves in hot , out-welling waters . And afterwards , at home , there were congratulations and comfortings , plus applications of vinegar and brown butcher 's paper to the severely smitten nose of this champion of his new Americanhood . But at school and in the street , henceforth there was due respect and a general atmosphere of `` let bygones be bygones . ''