midnight
`` Not on your daily bread , sonny . It is posted now by my own hand . We wo n't take any chances on _ this _ layout , and that I can tell you . '' He tramped down four flights and to the corner , although it was midnight and bitter cold . Then , with a seraphic grin on his countenance , he went to bed and slept the sleep of the just . The envelope was addressed to a Mr. James Fay , Spanish Gulch , South Dakota . When a man is twenty-one , and has had no experience , and graduates from a small college where he roomed alone in splendour , and possesses a gift of words and a certain delight in reading , and is thrown into new and , to him , romantic surroundings -- when all these stars of chance cross their orbits , he begins to write a novel .