three o'clock
It strikes me as not improbable that you -- ca n't see it in that light . Then come with me to the Mackerel camp before Paris , and mark where the antique Brigade is sitting-up with the expiring Confederacy . Observe how each morning 's sun is reflected from the gleaming spectacles of the venerable military organization ; while occasional rains make those same innumerable glasses resemble fairy lakes with dead fish in them . Note with what a respectable air of a reliable family physician each patriarchal warrior exhumes , from somewhere down his leg , the massive gold watch which he has been induced to buy for $ 10 of one of those national benefactors in jewelry who advertise affectionately in our more parental weekly journals of romance -- and remarks , oracularly : `` It being exactly three o'clock by this here nineteen-carat repeater , that air Confederacy has got just one hour less to live . '' The fact , my boy , that this timely observation would apply with about equal accuracy to the whole human family , need not deter your insidious self from answering in the affirmative , when I ask you , calmly , if it does not seem that a military organization of such intellect , _ must _ be engaged in some unspeakably profound scheme of victory , even though to the uneducated eye it may present somewhat the aspect of a muddy old gentleman with his head against a stone-wall ? And this business of showing the possible identity of apparent dead-pause with actual velocity , reminds me of a chap I once knew in the Sixth Ward . He was a cast-iron chap , my boy , whose most powerful conception of enterprise in trade was vividly associated with the duty of being forever in his shirt-sleeves ; and he kept a hardware shop at which the economical women of America could get such bargains in flat-irons and door-plates , as were a temptation to marry none but the most impoverished young men .