a few
hours after midnight
Oh , CERTAINLY , thank you ! '' However , he did sleep intermittently , drowsed between times , and even dreamed ; but , forgetting his dreams before he opened his eyes , and having some part of him all the while aware of his discomfort , he believed , as usual , that he lay awake the whole night long . He was conscious of the city as of some single great creature resting fitfully in the dark outside his windows . It lay all round about , in the damp cover of its night cloud of smoke , and tried to keep quiet for a few hours after midnight , but was too powerful a growing thing ever to lie altogether still . Even while it strove to sleep it muttered with digestions of the day before , and these already merged with rumblings of the morrow . `` Owl '' cars , bringing in last passengers over distant trolley-lines , now and then howled on a curve ; faraway metallic stirrings could be heard from factories in the sooty suburbs on the plain outside the city ; east , west , and south , switch-engines chugged and snorted on sidings ; and everywhere in the air there seemed to be a faint , voluminous hum as of innumerable wires trembling overhead to vibration of machinery underground . In his youth Adams might have been less resentful of sounds such as these when they interfered with his night 's sleep : even during an illness he might have taken some pride in them as proof of his citizenship in a `` live town '' ; but at fifty-five he merely hated them because they kept him awake .