SUNDIALS.*
erns sundial is the centre of the garden, and it is natural that gardeners should be attracted to view it from many Positions. If Miss Hartley is not a gardener, she has at all events the sense of what a garden should be to bold a sun- dial, and she can set a stone or a globe in pleasant perspective. Here are more than three hundred sketches of dials, some of them drawn in the positions which they actually occupy, as is the case with the dials of many churches and some in private grounds, and others with imaginary surroundings, more or less suitable and correct. Here and there the situation is a little puzzling, as when, for instance, Miss Hartley gives us a picture described as "Sundial, Holland, 17th Century," which consists of a vertical dial fixed over the gate of an inn, With gallant burghers swigging ale under the sign " Ye Rose and Crown." We wonder, again, whether Miss Hartley knows the fate of the stone which marked the day at Seven Dials, and which she sketches in a reconstructed corner of old London. Not long ago it was lying chipped and .dishonoured on a green in Weybridge, within hail of the rebuilt column dedicated to the memory of the Duchess of York who lived near by at Oatlande. Some of the subjects of Miss Hartley's drawings are frankly rescued from curiosity- shops and the -ands of builders and masons ; possibly they may now come to their own again and tell the right time among flowers of the old fashions and box-tree peacocks. We may note that Mr. F. Barker, of Clerkenwell—surely the right quarter to which to look for information as to the hour of day —contributes a chapter giving clear directions to the amateur as to the setting of-a dial on a pedestal. This is an easier matter than placing a vertical dial on a wall, and to obtain results correct enough for wandering visitors and children withont watches not much more is needed than the sun
• Ye Sundial Booke. By T. Geoffrey W. Henslow. Illustrated by D. Hartley. London : Edward Arnold. td. net.] shining, a chisel, some cement, and a little common-sense. To read the time on a horizontal sundial, you should stand facing the sun, and for the morning hours take the right-hand edge of the shadow ; the left edge for the afternoon hours. Finally, we are advised, a motto inscribed on the pedestal "gives a fitting voice to the dignified dial." Here comes in the work of Mr. Henslow, who. has no wish that any of his readers should lack a motto; he has written six `hundred. Some of them seem to recall pre- decessors :—.
" Take a lesson from my sign
and The dial says die all we must ";
"What is the time? come,"why do you ask P
Is it to start, or to end your task ? "
Not all, too, are wholly associated with sunlight. " What more appropriate or suitable motto could be chosen," askb Mr. Henslow, " than the three words 'Lead, kindly light,' taken. from•Cardinal Newman's hymn ? " He forgets the other half of the line. Many collections of sundial mottoes have been made, but are there any better than the old Latin ? When was " Horns non:numero nisi serenas " first carved on a dial ? It might prove an amusing task to frame mottoes for friends of various professions. "Do to-day's work to-morrow" might serve for secretaries of committees who are too often faced in their work with the deadly and pursuing reminder, "It is later than you think."
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