four in the morning
Not until the passion of this thought had abated , did he begin to perceive the other advantages before him . But so practical and thorough was he in all his proposals and means , that ere half-an-hour was gone , he had begun to go over his Rudiments again . He now wrote a version , or translation from English into Latin , five times a week , and read Caeser , Virgil , or Tacitus , every day . He gained permission from his grandmother to remove his bed to his own garret , and there , from the bedstead at which he no longer kneeled , he would often rise at four in the morning , even when the snow lay a foot thick on the skylight , kindle his lamp by means of a tinder-box and a splinter of wood dipped in sulphur , and sitting down in the keen cold , turn half a page of Addison into something as near Ciceronian Latin as he could effect . This would take him from an hour and a half to two hours , when he would tumble again into bed , blue and stiff , and sleep till it was time to get up and go to the morning school before breakfast . His health was excellent , else it could never have stood such treatment . His sole relaxation almost lay in the visit he paid every evening to the soutar and his wife .