THE SUNKEN GARDEN 299 
rectangular style. 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 ac- 
commodate 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. I am convinced that this estima- 
ble lady wilfully ignores conventional time and 
marks her cycles by such divisions as “ catalogue 
time,” “seed-buying time,” “planting time,” 
“sprouting time,’ “spraying time,” “ flowering 
time,” “seed-gathering time,” “mulching time,” 
and “dreary time,” until the catalogues come 
again. I know it seemed no time at all until 
she had let me in to the tune of $687 for the 
