Crossword-Solution: EARLINESS 9 letters, 7 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 9

With a quick step I entered the counting-room, where, notwithstanding the earliness of the hour, I found the clerk, busied as usual at his desk.

While the mourners were busy in the vault, the three village hags, who, notwithstanding the unwonted earliness of the hour, had snuffed the carrion like vultures, were seated on the “through-stane,” and engaged in their wonted unhallowed conference.

Despite the earliness of the hour a small crowd had gathered in the street outside, and the horrible menacing Trelawney refrain of the “Fifteen Hundred Voting Men” came in a steady, monotonous chant.

You are up.’ Now Friar Laurence says to Romeo:-- But where unbruised youth with unstuffed brain Doth couch his limbs, there GOLDEN SLEEP doth reign: Therefore thy earliness doth me assure, Thou art UP-ROUSED by some distemperature.

With birds it is difficult to decide by what standard we ought to judge of the earliness or lateness of the period of variation, whether by the age in reference to the duration of life, or to the power of reproduction, or to the number of moults through which the species passes.