> Strangely enough Mr Crompton is himself awakened by an alarm clock. He rose at 3:45 am and charged from fourpence to sixpence a week.
I think that's not so strange. If an alarm clock is expensive and hard to come by, one person in the town has a lucrative business by owning one.
I didn't include the previous sentence, which said that alarm clocks had put the knockers out of business, save a few, like the guy the quote was about.
> And who rouses the rousers?
little known fact, but it's actually something like the crowd doing a Wave in a stadium, it travels from east to west with the sun, rousers rousing neighbors, making a gradient across each timezone.