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The elder stones, dated a century back or more, have borders elaborately carved with flowers and are adorned with a multiplicity of death's-heads, crossbones, scythes, hour-glasses, and other lugubrious emblems of mortality, with here and there a winged cherub to direct the mourner's spirit upward.
To carry the scheme into practice great store of fine sea-sand the kind that blows about and is used to fill hour-glasses was provided throughout the building, especially at the points liable to attack, from which it could be brought into use.
Before there were hour-glasses and clepsydras, most phenomena could be estimated as to their durations and intervals, with no greater precision than degrees of hardness can be estimated by the fingers. Until a thermometric scale was contrived, men's judgments respecting relative amounts of heat stood on the same footing with their present judgments respecting relative amounts of sound.
Nearly all of those erected before the beginning of the present century bear quaint devices, some of cherubs, all wings, and blank, staring faces; some of hour-glasses, some of masonic emblems, and upon one of two are rudely carved, ugly death's heads and crossbones. Two thirds of the way down the line stands the first marble headstone.
The houses if houses they could be called were about twenty feet in height, rudely constructed of driftwood which had been brought down by the river, and could be compared in shape to nothing but hour-glasses.
The Franks were much astonished at the sight of the elephant; for they had never seen one before. They also wondered much at the clock. In those days there were in Europe no clocks such as we have; but water-clocks and hour-glasses were used in some places. The water-clock was a vessel into which water was allowed to trickle.
Also no one in past ages justified the use of sand in hour-glasses by saying that some centuries later interesting laws of motion would be discovered which would give a meaning to the statement that the sand was emptied from the bulbs in equal times.
The whole irregular space is, as it were, fringed with quaint old monuments, rich in death's-heads and scythes and hour-glasses, and doubly rich in pious epitaphs and Latin mottoes rich in them to such an extent that their proper space has run over, and they have crawled end- long up the shafts of columns and ensconced themselves in all sorts of odd corners among the sculpture.
"I should call it a pair of glasses," said Edith, as they watched the sand drip slowly from one glass into the other. Aunt Vi said it took exactly an hour for it to drain out, and our forefathers used to tell the time of day by hour-glasses before clocks were invented. "What are forefathers?" Lucy asked Edith. "Oh, Adam and Eve and all those old people," was the careless reply.
It contained a float which pointed to a scale of hours at the side of the vessel. The float gradually rose as the water trickled in. The hour-glasses measured time by the falling of fine sand from the top to the bottom of a glass vessel made with a narrow neck in the middle for the sand to go through.
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