midnight
They would sleep with all their clothes on , including their overcoats , and put over them all the bedding and spare clothing they owned ; the children would sleep all crowded into one bed , and yet even so they could not keep warm . The outside ones would be shivering and sobbing , crawling over the others and trying to get down into the center , and causing a fight . This old house with the leaky weatherboards was a very different thing from their cabins at home , with great thick walls plastered inside and outside with mud ; and the cold which came upon them was a living thing , a demon-presence in the room . They would waken in the midnight hours , when everything was black ; perhaps they would hear it yelling outside , or perhaps there would be deathlike stillness -- and that would be worse yet . They could feel the cold as it crept in through the cracks , reaching out for them with its icy , death-dealing fingers ; and they would crouch and cower , and try to hide from it , all in vain . It would come , and it would come ; a grisly thing , a specter born in the black caverns of terror ; a power primeval , cosmic , shadowing the tortures of the lost souls flung out to chaos and destruction . It was cruel iron-hard ; and hour after hour they would cringe in its grasp , alone , alone .