eleven o'clock
Much of all his sufferings would have been alleviated , were it not that his two best friends in the parish , Thady and the curate , had been both prostrated by the fever at the same time with himself . There was consequently no person of respectability in the neighborhood cognizant of his situation . He was left to the humbler class of the peasantry , and honorably did they , with all their errors and ignorance , discharge those duties which greater wealth and greater knowledge would , probably , have left unperformed . On the morning of the last day he ever intended to spend in the shed , at eleven o'clock he hoard the sounds of horses ' feet passing along the road , The circumstance was one quite familiar to him ; but these horsemen , whoever they might be , stopped , and immediately after , two respectable looking men , dressed in black , approached him . His forlorn state and frightfully wasted appearance startled them , and the younger of the two asked , in a tone of voice which went directly to his heart , how it was that they found him in a situation so desolate . The kind interest implied by the words , and probably a sense of his utterly destitute state , affected him strongly , and he burst into tears . The strangers looked at each other , then at him ; and if looks could express sympathy , theirs expressed it .