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We top-sawyers went at our prostrate and vanquished non-resistant, and without mercy mangled and dismembered him, until he was merely a bare trunk, a torso incapable of restoration. While we were thus busy, useful, and happy, the dripping rain, like a clepsydra, told off the morning moments. The dinner-hour drew nigh. We had determined on a feast, and trout were to be its daintiest dainty.
E'en jade-fine rice, and gold-like drinks they make hard to go down; they choke the throat. The lass has not the heart to desist gazing in the glass at her wan face. Nothing can from that knitted brow of hers those frowns dispel; For hard she finds it patient to abide till the clepsydra will have run its course.
The wheat is brought from the Teli. The Wad-el-Khalouf is dry, except in winter, but its bed is bored with inexhaustible wells, whose waters are distributed among the gardens by means of a clepsydra, or a vessel which drops so much water in an hour. The ancients measured time by the dropping of water, like the falling of sand in the hour-glass.
"Well," he said, "clepsydras always work better when nearly full than when nearly empty. When you feed him have a full clepsydra handy and start it when he begins to eat. Then by it feed him again after two hours. Keep to that interval and to the diet I have enjoined." Next day I spent over three hours in Nemestronia's water-garden, Tanno with me for most of the time.
We give an illustration of the staircase newel in Cromwell House, Highgate, with its quaint little figure of a man standing on a lofty pedestal. Sometimes one comes across strange curiosities in old houses, the odds and ends which Time has accumulated. On p. 201 is a representation of a water-clock or clepsydra which was made at Norwich by an ingenious person named Parson in 1610.
When a case came up for a hearing, the accuser was allowed the first jar of water, the accused the second, and the judge the third. Stationed beside the clepsydra was a special officer whose duty it was not only to fill it but to stop the flow whenever a speaker was interrupted, thereby making certain he was not cheated of any of the time due him." "A bully scheme!" Christopher remarked.
"But do not imagine you are the only one who is not always able to put in the proper place the scraps of knowledge in his possession. Many an older person has wondered what part his learning had in the gigantic total of the ages. World history is conceived on a pretty big scale, you see. But that all we glean is somehow linked up with the rest, you may be very sure. Certainly this clepsydra was."
Near the cypresses is a fountain, scarcely heard, whose fall is so feeble and slow, that one would be led to call it the clepsydra of this solitude, where time makes so little noise. Sometimes the moon penetrates it with her pale lustre, and her absence and return may be considered as an event in this monotonous scene.
The old courtesans whispered into one another's ears, with a degree of respect, that a petty Asiatic king, on passing through Athens, had given Myrrhina two talents for one visit as much as any republic in Greece would spend in a year and that the beautiful hetæra, unmoved by such a fortune, had suffered his presence only while her clepsydra emptied itself once, for, tired of men, she measured prurience by her water-clock.
Viands were served on tables a few inches high, and people sat while eating. From the middle of the seventh century a clepsydra of Chinese origin was used to mark the hours. The first of these instruments is recorded to have been made in A.D. 660, and tradition does not tell what device had previously served the purpose.
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