four o'clock
When they had got them all heaped up like a pile of grape-shot at the foot of the tree , they began to hull them , with blows of a stick , or with stones , and to pick the nuts from the hulls , where the grubs were battening on their assured ripeness , and to toss them into a little heap , a very little heap indeed compared with the bulk of that they came from . The boys gloried in getting as much walnut stain on their hands as they could , for it would not wash off , and it showed for days that they had been walnutting ; sometimes they got to staining one another 's faces with the juice , and pretending they were Indians . The sun rose higher and higher , and burned the frost from the grass , and while the boys worked and yelled and chattered they got hotter and hotter , and began to take off their shoes and stockings , till every one of them was barefoot . Then , about three or four o'clock , they would start homeward , with half a bushel of walnuts in their wagon , and their shoes and stockings piled in on top of them . That is , if they had good luck . In a story , they would always have had good luck , and always gone home with half a bushel of walnuts ; but this is a history , and so I have to own that they usually went home with about two quarts of walnuts rattling round under their shoes and stockings in the bottom of the wagon . They usually had no such easy time getting them as they always would in a story ; they did not find them under the trees , or ready to drop off , but they had to knock them off with about six or seven clubs or rocks to every walnut , and they had to pound the hulls so hard to get the nuts out that sometimes they cracked the nuts .