about five o’clock
But it does n't matter though , whether you did or not , because they retired from business long since . It 's eighty years ago , since the circumstance happened to a traveller for that house , but he was a particular friend of my uncle 's ; and my uncle told the story to me . It 's a queer name ; but he used to call it THE BAGMAN 'S STORY and he used to tell it , something in this way . ` One winter 's evening , about five o'clock , just as it began to grow dusk , a man in a gig might have been seen urging his tired horse along the road which leads across Marlborough Downs , in the direction of Bristol . I say he might have been seen , and I have no doubt he would have been , if anybody but a blind man had happened to pass that way ; but the weather was so bad , and the night so cold and wet , that nothing was out but the water , and so the traveller jogged along in the middle of the road , lonesome and dreary enough . If any bagman of that day could have caught sight of the little neck-or-nothing sort of gig , with a clay-coloured body and red wheels , and the vixenish , ill tempered , fast - going bay mare , that looked like a cross between a butcher 's horse and a twopenny post-office pony , he would have known at once , that this traveller could have been no other than Tom Smart , of the great house of Bilson and Slum , Cateaton Street , City . However , as there was no bagman to look on , nobody knew anything at all about the matter ; and so Tom Smart and his clay-coloured gig with the red wheels , and the vixenish mare with the fast pace , went on together , keeping the secret among them , and nobody was a bit the wiser .