These beds please the
eye of the mistress, and of her friends, too, if they are candid in
their remarks, which I doubt.
While excavating the garden we found a granite boulder shaped somewhat
like an egg and nearly five feet long. It was a big thing, and not very
shapely; but it came from the soil, and Polly wanted it for the base of
her sun-dial. We placed it, big end down, in the mathematical centre of
the garden (I insisted on that), and sunk it into the ground to make it
solid; then a stone mason fashioned a flat space on the top to
accommodate an old brass dial that Polly had found in Boston. The dial
is not half bad. From the heavy, octagonal brass base rises a slender
quill to cast its shadow on the figured circle, while around this circle
old English characters ask, "Am I not wise, who note only bright hours?"
A plat of sod surrounds the dial, and Polly goes to it at least once a
day to set her watch by the shadow of the quill, though I have told her
a hundred times that it is seventeen minutes off standard time.
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