seven in the evening
Yet I can not regard this abandon as a perfectly healthy emotion , and I do not counsel my reader to mount himself upon the wagon and ride to and fro even once , for afterwards the remembrance of such an excess will grieve him . Of course , I meant to imply by this that moving sometimes comes to an end , though it is not easy to believe so while moving . The time really arrives when you sit down in your new house , and amid whatever disorder take your first meal there . This meal is pretty sure to be that gloomy tea , that loathly repast of butter and toast , and some kind of cake , with which the soul of the early-dining American is daily cast down between the hours of six and seven in the evening ; and instinctively you compare it with the last meal you took in your old house , seeking in vain to decide whether this is more dispiriting than that . At any rate that was not at all the meal which the last meal in any house which has been a home ought to be in fact , and is in books . It was hurriedly cooked ; it was served upon fugitive and irregular crockery ; and it was eaten in deplorable disorder , with the professional movers waiting for the table outside the dining-room . It ought to have been an act of serious devotion ; it was nothing but an expiation .