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In times of peace he gave himself up to studying the mathematics, in which he was a proficient, and to the designing of such curious toys as sundials, water-clocks, pumps, and the like; which he so multiplied about the premises, out of pure joy in constructing them, that Simeon, his body-servant, had much ado to live among the many contrivances for making his life easier.
I never thought of that in my life." "Most of us don't." "I suppose that was why people began making clocks." "You don't for a moment imagine men leaped from sundials to clocks, do you?" interrogated the Scotchman quizzically. "Oh, perhaps not such nice ones as ours," conceded the boy with easy unconcern. "Still they had to tell time somehow." "Clocks were a long way off from suns and shadows."
Thus around more than half of their circumference they melt the ice in a semicircle, and the glacier is covered with little crescent-shaped troughs of this description, with a steep wall on one side and a shallow one on the other, and a little heap of loose materials in the bottom. They are the sundials of the glacier, recording the hour by the advance of the sun's rays upon them.
In "Chats on Old Copper and Brass" some mention is made of old clocks, and of the watch which grew in beauty and fineness of workmanship as it evolved from the watch-clock and the still earlier lantern and other old clocks, which were gradually introduced to supersede or supplement the earlier sundials. Very remarkable indeed are some of these household curios.
In summer, ease-loving guests took their pleasure here, but when winter held the hills, wild deer came down and gingerly picked their way close to the sundials and marble basins of the sunken gardens. Foxes, too, stole on cushioned feet across the terraces at the end of the pergola.
What an antique air had the now almost effaced sundials, with their moral inscriptions, seeming coevals with that Time which they measured, and to take their revelations of its flight immediately from heaven, holding correspondence with the fountain of light!
The instinct of a Romantic invited to say what he felt about anything was to recall its associations. A rose, for instance, made him think of old gardens and young ladies and Edmund Waller and sundials, and a thousand quaint and gracious things that, at one time or another, had befallen him or someone else. A rose touched life at a hundred pretty points.
My mother arranged them in a novel bouquet a bouquet of wild flowers, the base of it yellow primroses, the apex of pink shepherd's sundials, and between the base and the apex one of the greatest variety of wild flowers ever gotten together in that part of the world. It created a sensation and took first prize. At the close of the exhibition Mrs. James Chaine distributed the prizes.
They constructed sundials, clepsydras, astrolabes, gnomons. Not without interest do we still look on specimens of their method of printing. Upon a revolving roller they engraved, in cuneiform letters, their records, and, running this over plastic clay formed into blocks, produced ineffaceable proofs. From their tile-libraries we are still to reap a literary and historical harvest.
It is true that poetry of the grand order interests equally all ages; but the world ever throws out a poetry not of the grandest; not meant to be durable not meant to be universal, but following the shifts and changes of human sentiment, and just like those pretty sundials formed by flowers, which bloom to tell the hour, open their buds to tell it, and, telling it, fade themselves from time."
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