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Updated: May 11, 2025
"That's a nice old article of virtue," he said, pointing with his chin; and, walking round the sundial, he made its acquaintance from the other side. Its grey profile cast a thin and shortening shadow on the turf; tongues of moss were licking at its sides; the daisies clustered thick around its base; it had acquired a look of growing from the soil.
"'Put the papers on the sundial, I read, peeping over his shoulder. "'What papers? What sundial? he asked. "'The sundial in the garden. There is no other, said I; 'but the papers must be those that are destroyed. "'Pooh! said he, gripping hard at his courage. 'We are in a civilised land here, and we can't have tomfoolery of this kind. Where does the thing come from?
The library, which formed the corner of the new wing, had two windows, the one immediately above the gravel path looking out over the rosery, the other round the corner of the house giving on the same path, beyond which ran a high hedge of clipped box surrounding the so-called Pleasure Ground, a plot of smooth grass with a sundial in the centre.
Inside was a beautiful stretch of lawn with an old sundial in the middle, the whole effect so soothing and restful that it was welcome to my somewhat jangled nerves. In that deeply peaceful atmosphere one could forget, or remember only as some fantastic nightmare, that darkened study with the sprawling, bloodstained figure on the floor.
The dials are exceedingly curious, and there are some really astonishing calculations, as, for instance, a table showing the 'number of souls that have appeared before the Tribunal of God. Near a great sundial are these solemn words: 'Sol et luna faciunt quae precepta sunt eis; nos autem pergrimamur a Domino. The church itself is one of the most fantastically ugly structures imaginable.
The Palace of the Maharajah is neither particularly interesting nor beautiful, and we did not visit it further than to inspect the ancient observatory built by Jey Singh, with its huge sundial, whose gnomon stands 80 feet above the ground!
So it was not because her mind shrank from these memories of her married life that it conjured back again the scent of the honeysuckles on the house-porch that looked on the garden with the sundial on the wall above it, its welcome to that of the June roses; its dissension with the flavour of the damp weeds that clung to the time-worn timbers of the water-wheel, or that of the grinding flour when the wind blew from the mill, and carried with it from the ventilators some of the cloud that could not help forward the whitening of the roof.
There was no sign of hothouse roses or rare exotic plants, but he noticed a beehive, a quaint sundial with an inscription, and along the middle path down which he walked were at intervals little dilapidated busts or figures of stone on pedestals some of them lacking tips of noses or ears. It did not occur to Mr. Anderson that antiquity rather than poverty was responsible for these ravages.
At luncheon next day our invalid, a real invalid no longer, joined us at table in the pleasant dining-room, the broad window of which opened upon the formal garden with the sundial in the center. She was in good spirits, and, as Hephzy confided to me afterward, was "gettin' a real nice appetite."
Past sombre trees, mighty of girth and branch, I hurried; past still pools, full of a moony radiance, where lilies floated; past marble fauns and dryads that peeped ghost-like from leafy solitudes; past sundial and carven bench, by clipped yew-hedges and winding walks until, screened in shadow, I paused to look upon a great and goodly house; and as I stood there viewing it over from terrace-walk to gabled roof, I heard a distant clock chime ten.
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