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Sundial   Listen
noun
Sundial  n.  An instrument to show the time of day by means of the shadow of a gnomon, or style, on a plate.
Sundial shell (Zool.), any shell of the genus Solarium. See Solarium.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Sundial" Quotes from Famous Books



... seventeenth. The moss-grown moat walls enclosed an old-world garden, most jealously guarded by high yew hedges trimmed into fantastic shapes of birds and animals; a garden of parterres and lawns, where tritons blew stone horns, and naked nymphs bathed in marble fountains; with an ancient sundial on which the gay scapegrace Suckling had once scribbled a sonnet to a pair of blue eyes—a garden full of sequestered walks and hidden nooks where courtly cavaliers and bewitching dames in brocades ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees

... finish, or any of the tricks of modern buildings." Westham church was one of the first that the Conqueror built, and remains of the original Norman structure are still serviceable. The vicar suggests that it may very possibly have stood a siege. In the jamb of the south door of the Norman wall is a sundial, without which, one might say, no church is completely perfect. In the tower dwell unmolested a colony of owls, six of whom once attended a "reading-in" service and, seated side by side on a beam, ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas

... for 4 baiocchi each! (about two pence.) The designs are of the usual style, cupboards and various objects in perspective; one of the finest is the first on the left, which includes a fine sphere and sundial, and several books written in German letters, black and red, a chalice in a cupboard, two books, and a cross. In the seventh is the figure of Pope Gregory in the act of blessing, and the last on the right ...
— Intarsia and Marquetry • F. Hamilton Jackson

... a sundial is to be constructed, we must take the equinoctial shadow of the place. If it is found to be, as in Rome, equal to eight ninths of the gnomon, let a line be drawn on a plane surface, and in the middle thereof erect a perpendicular, plumb to the line, which perpendicular is ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius

... this very transept. For instance, the original gable was removed early in the eighteenth century, and a covering substituted, of a kind which Mr. Dollman humorously describes as "the pleasing novelty of a hipped roof." Again, in 1679 a sundial was placed over the central window, to give way in 1735 to an ingenious combination of sundial and clock, for which a triangular arrangement, presenting a clock of two faces, was substituted four years later. See illustration, p. 27. All these may now be regarded as among the things that ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley

... and lets him rave for a season, but all chance-wise, of people and things once dear, or of people and things indifferent. Once more the poor fellow is back at his home in fair Provence, and sees the sundial that stood in his childhood's garden—sees his mother, and the long-since forgotten face of that little dear sister—(he sees her, he says, on a Sunday morning, for all the church bells are ringing); he looks up and down through the universe, and owns ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... lunch, or left the office after work was over, she looked up and down King Street in the hope, almost the expectation, of seeing him waiting for her to come. Then the expectation died away; the hope grew fainter and fainter, like a shadow that the sun casts upon the sundial until, at an hour before setting, ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston

... umbrella: "Oak," you impress upon her, "all oak." You draw her attention to the view: you tell her the local legend. By fixing her head against the window-pane she can see the tree on which the man was hanged. You dwell upon the sundial; you mention for a second ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome

... explained. "You see, I've dug a round face and marked it out into twelve parts, and I'm going to put each figure in different-coloured flowers. Then I thought if I could fix a pole in the middle it ought to cast a shadow, and tell the time like a sundial. I've made it north, south, east, and west by my compass, and it will be most delightful if I can ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil

... fire. And meanwhile the shadows shorten—and just as they do every day, beneath this sky which is never overcast, just as they have done for five and thirty centuries, these columns, these friezes and this temple itself, like a mysterious and solemn sundial, record patiently on the ground the slow passing of the hours. Verily for us, the ephemerae of thought, this unbroken continuity of the sun of Egypt has more of melancholy even than the changing, overcast ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti

... more obliging than your attention to the old stones. You have been as true as the sundial itself." [The sundial had just been erected.] "Of the two I would prefer the larger one, as it is to be in front of a parapet quite in the old taste. But in case of accidents it will be safest in your custody till I come to town again on the 12th of May. Your former favors (which were weighty ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... is situated close to the cave already described, there was discovered about the year 1771 a sundial bearing the longest known inscription of the Anglo-Saxon period. The discoverer was the Rev. William Dade, rector of Barmston, in the East Riding, and a letter of great length, on the stone, from the pen of Mr J. C. Brooke, F.S.A. of the Herald's College, ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home

... time-keeper, chronometer, horologe, clock, watch, hourglass, chronograph, chronoscope, clepsydra, gnomon, repeater, sundial, isochronon. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... column edited by a man of letters, whose business it is to fill it every day, either with the blossoms of his own intelligence or of outside contributors, or a little of each: such a column as Don Marquis edits for The Sun, called "The Sundial," and Franklin R. Adams for The Tribune, called "The Conning Tower," and Christopher Morley for the New York Evening Post, called "The Bowling Green." Perhaps the unsigned "Way of the World" in our Morning Post ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas

... the sundial, Mistress Alice," said the gallant, rising and colouring, through a sense of the contempt with which ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott

... at six o'clock, the watchman blew his horn as loudly as possible for some two or three minutes, the hollow sound echoing through the place. He took the time by the sundial on the wall, it being a summer morning; in winter he was guided by the position of the stars, and often, when sun or stars were obscured, went by guess. The house horn was blown thrice a day; at six in the morning, as ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies

... columns which once composed the noble Hotel de Soissons; it was erected for the purposes of astrology, and contains a winding staircase, and is ornamented with emblematic symbols, of the widowhood of Catherine de Medicis, as broken mirrors, C. and H. interlaced, etc. An ingenious sundial is placed on its shaft, and a fountain in ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve

... Knipe, the wolf-hound, were our train, though not as decorous as rigid etiquette demanded, since they were forever running after the butterflies. On we went through the stiff, box-bordered walks of the garden, past the weather-beaten sundial and the spinning-house and the smoke-house to the stables. Here old Harvey, who had taught me to ride Captain Daniel's pony, is equerry, and young Harvey our personal attendant; old Harvey smiles as we go in and out of the stalls rubbing the noses of our trusted friends, and gives a ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... which railes and houses runs a fair street." The square, or, as it was commonly called, garden, was well gravelled for greater accommodation of those who wished to take the air; and that its surface might more quickly dry after rain, it was raised by an easy ascent to the centre, where stood a sundial fixed on a black marble pillar, at the base of which were stone steps, "whereon ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy

... recited that a sundial in Central Park, the gift of a wealthy citizen, was weathering badly. It should be protected. That sounded reasonable, so everybody 25 signed just below the name of everybody else. And what had we petitioned for? A roof to cover ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell

... "A rude sundial, without a gnomon, is almost obliterated from the wall of the cloisters, but its motto, 'Dies nostri quasi umbra super terram et nulli est mora', still resists the effects of decay, as if to serve the appropriate purpose of the convent's epitaph. At the foot ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse

... demon note-taker, and he had a passion for being equipped so that he could cope with any observation which might turn up. Thus Old Griff on a sledge journey might have notebooks protruding from every pocket, and hung about his person, a sundial, a prismatic compass, a sheath knife, a pair of binoculars, a geological hammer, chronometer, pedometer, camera, aneroid and other items of surveying gear, as well as his goggles and mitts. And in his hand might be an ice-axe which ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard

... administration gave her a warning; they did not allow the irretrievable hours to be stolen from her with a noiseless hand. At All Souls' College, Oxford, in the first quadrangle, grave, thoughtful men raised to the top story, two hundred years ago, a grand sundial, the largest, perhaps, and noblest in the kingdom. They set it on the face of the Quad, and wrote over the long pointer in large letters of gold, these words, "Pereunt et imputantur," which refer to the hours indicated below, and ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade

... are a land-mark of the country on all sides, though the tallest of them was blown down a few years ago. Near them is one of the old-fashioned orangeries, with a great deal of wall and very little glass, and near it stands the sundial ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge

... She had grazed her knee, and her stocking was much more than grazed, and her dress was cut by the same stone which had attended to the knee and the stocking. Of course the others were not such sneaks as to abandon a comrade in misfortune, so they all sat on the grass-plot round the sundial, and Jane darned away for dear life. The Lamb was still in the hands of Martha having its clothes ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit

... still standing near the Market Place. At one time a sundial and ball crowned the structure, but these have been replaced by a cross. Close by it and scattered frequently throughout the streets of the city are overhanging houses that betray their ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White

... panelled walls, very much to all appearance as when tenanted by Harry Fielding. The windows of the sitting-room and bedroom look out on to the beautiful old buildings of Brick Court, and from the head of the staircase one looks across to the stately gilded sundial of Pump Court, old even in Fielding's ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden

... wild walk yesterday. I have a notion of encamping on the Boulsworth moors to study heather; and heartily tired of being caged up here in my library, with nothing to see but wet garden-walks and dripping yew trees, and a sundial whereon no shadow had fallen the livelong day, I determined, in spite of the rain to be off to the moors to choose a site for my encampment. Not very far from this house still dwells an old servant of my uncle's with whom I am on the friendliest terms. So ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan

... with alacrity, and was conducted to the study. No Randolf was there, only pen, ink, paper, and algebra. But as she was greeting Owen, who looked much better and less oppressed, Honor made an exclamation, and from the window they saw the young man leaning over the sundial, partly studying its mysteries, partly playing with little Owen, who hung on him as ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge

... can be more obliging than your attention to the old stones. You have been as true as the sundial itself.' [The sundial had just been erected.] 'Of the two I would prefer the larger one, as it is to be in front of a parapet quite in the old taste. But in case of accidents it will be safest in your ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... the background were the Worralls and Lucy Bretherton (the little crippled sister), Mr. Wallace, and myself. She did the balcony scene, the morning scene with Romeo, the scene with the nurse after Tybalt's death, and the scene of the philtre. There is an old sundial in the garden, which caught the moonbeams. She leaned her arms upon it, her eyes fixed upon the throbbing moonlit sky, her white brocaded dress glistening here and there in the pale light—a vision of perfect beauty. And when she began her ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... find the past still alive and in action; and here it was so in this one only spot, and these few persons into the midst of whom he had suddenly been cast. With these reflections he looked forth from his window into the old-fashioned garden, and at the stone sundial, which had numbered all the hours—all the daylight and serene ones, at least—since his mysterious ancestor left the country. And [is] this, then, he thought to himself, the establishment of which some rumor had been preserved? ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... somewhere. You know the sort of thing that happens—one unveils a bust of Carlyle and makes a speech about Ruskin, and then people come in their thousands and read 'Rabid Ralph, or Should he have Bitten Her?' Don't forget, please, I'm going to have the medallion with the fat cupid sitting on a sundial. And just one thing more—perhaps I ought not to ask you, but you have such nice kind eyes, you embolden one to make daring requests, would you send me the recipe for those lovely chestnut-and-chicken-liver sandwiches? I know the ingredients of course, but ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki

... M[u]s[a] al-Khow[a]razm[i], whose name has already been mentioned,[390] was called to that city. He was the most celebrated mathematician of his time, either in the East or West, writing treatises on arithmetic, the sundial, the astrolabe, chronology, geometry, and algebra, and giving through the Latin transliteration of his name, algoritmi, the name of algorism to the early arithmetics using the new Hindu numerals.[391] Appreciating at once the value of the position system so recently brought ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith

... requested a sermon upon the genealogy of Melchizedek, which the minister agreed to furnish when our blacksmith could tell him the foundry which manufactured Tubal Cain's hammer and anvil. Lot's wife, the witch of Endor, Jonah's whale, the sundial of Ahaz, and the population of Nineveh, were all duly discussed, together with the bodies in which the angels dined with Abraham. Did the loaves and fishes miraculously multiply in numbers, or increase in size? Where did the angel get the flour ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... an old chateau frowned down as they twisted and turned through the grounds where once men had flirted and women had sighed. Now the rose garden was used as a rubbish heap for tins; and by the over-grown sundial, chipped and scarred by a stray shell, two wooden crosses stuck out of the long rank grass. At last they reached the Canal, and the engine stopped near the ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile

... beauties of her abode and enlarge upon the unusual qualities of her personality. She showed and told me all. We explored the estate from the dog-kennel to the loggia for sleeping out "under the stars;" from the pergola to the library; from the sundial to the telephone, "the only one for miles;" and as we walked between the purple and mauve Michaelmas daisies in her long herbaceous borders, with Red Admiral butterflies among the myriad little clean blossoms, she ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 13, 1920 • Various

... The sundial is an instrument for measuring time by using the shadow of the sun. They were quite common in ancient times before clocks and watches were invented. At the present time they are used more as an ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics

... regretted, rebuilt by Essex in the latter part of the eighteenth century; but for this the view of the river front from the curiously constructed footbridge would have been far finer than it is. Like the sundial in the first court, this bridge, leading to soft meadows beneath the shade of great trees, is attributed ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home

... went into the Home of the Street Sweepers. It is a grey house on a narrow street. There is a sundial in its courtyard, by which the Council of the Home can tell the hours of the day and when to ring the bell. When the bell rings, we all arise from our beds. [-They-] {The} sky is green and cold in our windows to the east. The shadow on the sundial marks off a half-hour ...
— Anthem • Ayn Rand

... devotion bestowed upon them. At the farther end was a trellised summer-house in which he perceived that the maiden ladies were taking afternoon tea. There was no sign of hothouse roses or rare exotic plants, but he noticed a beehive, a quaint sundial with an inscription, and along the middle path down which he walked were at intervals little dilapidated busts or figures of stone on pedestals—some of them lacking tips of noses or ears. It did not occur to Mr. Anderson that antiquity rather than poverty was responsible ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant

... the meridian by equal altitudes of the sun, and also by the pole-star at its upper or lower culmination; finding the latitude by the meridian altitude of the sun, or of some of the principal stars; and making a rude sundial by erecting a gnomon towards the pole. For these simple calculations I had Hannay and Dietrichsen's Almanac, a copious publication which gave all the important data in the Nautical Almanac, besides much other interesting matter useful for the astronomical ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant

... p. 149: "This country is in the sea to the south-west. It is adjacent to a large island. There are usually (there, i.e., on the great island) great p'oeng birds which so mask the sun in their flight that the shade on the sundial is shifted. If the great p'oeng finds a wild camel it swallows it, and if one should chance to find p'oeng's feather, he can make a water-butt of it, after cutting ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... here until 29th January). The next day I had an awful attack of snow blindness, but the way down the glacier was so easy that it did not matter. I forgot whether Lashly or Crean led then, but I marched alongside, keeping in touch with the trace by hitching the lanyard of my sundial on to it and holding this in my hand. I usually carried the sundial slung round my neck, so that it was easy to pick it up and consult it. That day I was in awful pain, and although we had some dope for putting on our eyes ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans

... desert, told the time of day. The shadow of the sun roughly gave those who were familiar with astronomy the lay of the land and the time, approximately. When the dial and the gnomon were understood, dialling became a popular science, and ere long the sundial on the church tower, in a public place, or in a private garden, told the time. Then came the marking of time by pocket dials—an advance which foreshadowed the watch which was ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess

... towel in the other. Instead of which, the Bassett was one of the group which included Aunt Dahlia and Uncle Tom and seemed to be busy trying to make Anatole see the bright side, while Angela and Gussie were, respectively, leaning against the sundial with a peeved look and sitting on the grass rubbing a barked shin. Tuppy was walking up and down ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse

... the left a fine old barn, its thatched roof deep brown, the props supporting it black with age. In front of the pillared porch there was a little square of white cobble-stones and in the middle of these an old grey sundial. The whole place was bathed in the absolute peace of ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole

... higher and brighter before his eyes from her description of it. Soon he knew each room, each arbor in the garden, the pond, surrounded by green bushes and shrubs, before it the shining glass balls, and the sundial on the terrace: only fancy, a clock on which the sun itself had to mark ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann

... breathe and bask. At the midsummer which we are now speaking of, I must needs confess that the noontide sun came down more fervently than I found altogether tolerable; so that I was fain to shift my position with the shadow of the shrubbery, making myself the movable index of a sundial that reckoned up the hours ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... dear! Right under the two towers, with their shadows a changing upon it all day like a kind of a sundial, and country people driving in and out of the courtyard in carts and hooded cabriolets and such like, and a market outside in front of the cathedral, and all so quaint and like a picter. The Major and me agreed that whatever came of my Legacy this was the place to ...
— Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy • Charles Dickens

... mechanical clock has been thought by some to be the sundial. Actually these devices represent two different approaches to the problem of time-keeping. True ancestor of the clock is to be found among the highly complex astronomical machines which man has been building ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price

... she was standing with Brian there was an old, old stone sundial, supposed to be almost as ancient as the burial-places of the long-headed men of the stone age; and against this granite pillar Brian planted himself, as if prepared for ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon

... know whether it's dinner or supper I'm cooking," I supplemented. "But does it matter? You won't get anything different, no matter which it is—just fish is what you'll get. And pretty soon the sun will be out, and you can set up a stick and watch the shadow and make a sundial for yourself." ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge

... under the rocky mountain side. These are without numbers as the streets are without names. Here, moreover, rises no village spire to point the thoughts of men heavenward; no church bell rings out its merry festal peals, or tolls the march to the grave; no sundial marks the succession of the hours which pass by unheeded all, save those of morning, noon, and evening; and in no public school-house is heard the low buzz of children conning their tasks. But the mollah calls to ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie

... he declared; but it took more than that to "dodge" the Maluka's resourcefulness. He spent a little while in the sun with a compass and a few wooden pegs, and a sundial lay on the ground just outside ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn

... and unveils itself more often and more quickly and more unexpectedly at Menton than at any place on the Riviera. And the setting for watching the changes is perfect. Menton can say, in the words of the old sundial, ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons

... sundial ran the girl, and around to the rear of the house. Then she burrowed under a dense rosebush and pushed her way through a basement window, almost hidden by the undergrowth, the sash of which swung inward at ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock

... between the surging clouds. A long flight of mossy steps ascends to the plateau occupied by the Sanatorium, with wide verandahs and a poetic garden, like some old Italian pleasaunce, with fountain and sundial, espaliered orange boughs, and ancient rose-trees overhanging paved walks, gay parterres, and avenues of myrtle or heliotrope. Flowers are perennial even on these airy heights, and dense hedges of datura, with long white bells drooping in myriads over the ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings

... the work of the practical astronomer is made use of in our daily life throughout the whole country in yet another way. Our fore-fathers had to regulate their clocks by a sundial, or perhaps by a mark at the corner of the house, which showed where the shadow of the house fell at noon. Very rude indeed was this method; and it was uncertain for another reason. It is not always exactly twenty-four hours between two noons by the sun, Sometimes for two or three ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb

... parallel with the wall, bounded on the farther side by a strip of turf and an unfenced pine wood. On the lawn, between the house and the drive, is a clipped yew tree, with a garden bench in its shade. On the opposite side the garden is shut in by a box hedge; and there is a little sundial on the turf, with an iron chair near it. A little path leads through the box ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw

... those small picturesque surprises common in the old landscape gardening; a kind of small round hill or dome of grass, like a giant mole-hill, ringed and crowned with three concentric fences of roses, and having a sundial in the highest point in the centre. Kidd could see the finger of the dial stand up dark against the sky like the dorsal fin of a shark and the vain moonlight clinging to that idle clock. But he saw something else ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton

... when the nights were cold, were still essentials. The boy was fortunate who did not have to break the ice in his water pail morning after morning in winter. Clocks and watches were luxuries for the rich. The sundial was yet in use, and when the flight of time was to be noted in hours or parts, people resorted to the hour glass. Many a minister used one on Sundays to time his preaching by, and many a housewife to time her ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster

... modeled in clay, cut from paper, or drawn with crayon; the making of sand-table scenes showing early New England life in various phases; the making of various utensils and commodities of the primitive home which differ from our own; as, for example, the making of candles, the hour glass, and the sundial. ...
— Primary Handwork • Ella Victoria Dobbs

... colour, could have desired a more inspiring environment. The back of the house, looking southward, descends by one flight of steps upon a lawn, where one of the balustrades of the old Rochester Bridge had, when this was demolished, been fitted up as a sundial. The lawn, in turn, communicates with flower and vegetable gardens by another flight of steps. Beyond is "the much-coveted meadow" which Dickens obtained, partly by exchange, from the trustees—not of Watts's Charity, ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin

... of it, without having taken much thought as to what path he was following. Ah! there at last was the centre, easily gained. And there was something to reward him. His first impression was that the central ornament was a sundial; but when he had switched away some portion of the thick growth of brambles and bindweed that had formed over it, he saw that it was a less ordinary decoration. A stone column about four feet high, and on the top of it a metal globe—copper, to judge by the ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James

... and old inns of the Bohemian Quartier Latin, inns which the tourist never sees, and where "collectors" are to all intents unknown. Set upon this landing of polished oak upon the first floor was a very ancient sundial, taken from some French chateau, a truly beautiful objet d'art in azure and faded gold, with foliated crest above, borne long ago, no doubt, by some highly pompous dignitary. Here and there, too, were suits of ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux

... the fine West Gate and the King's Gate, over which is St. Swithun's church. The churches of Winchester are little more than half their former number. St. Maurice has a Norman doorway and St. Michael a Saxon sundial. St. John Baptist and St. Peter, Cheesehill, are of the most general interest. The former has a screen and pulpit over four hundred years old; transitional arches; and an Easter sepulchre. The latter is a square church mostly ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes

... that the Master and several of the Fellows were in the garden, and would fain see him on his arrival. So Gilbert, carrying a little bundle which contained his precious book, went out there at once. The Master had caused to be made a new sundial, which he had affixed in such a way to the wall that those whose chambers gave on the garden could read the time of day without waiting to hear ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson

... From the sundial towards James's gate walked Mr Kernan, pleased with the order he had booked for Pulbrook Robertson, boldly along James's street, past Shackleton's offices. Got round him all right. How do you do, Mr Crimmins? First rate, sir. I was afraid you might be up in your other ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... stood to read, his bulky manuscript in his hands. Against the sundial, facing the poet, leaned the tall figure of Messer Fifanti, his bald head uncovered and shining humidly, his eyes ever and anon stealing a look at his splendid wife where she sat so demurely at the ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini

... almost impassable with unpruned branches, while here lay a heap of rubbish, there a smashed flower-pot, here a crushed water-pot, there a broken dinner-plate. Following a path that led away from the wall, he came upon a fountain without any water, in a cracked basin dry as a lizard-haunted wall, a sundial without a gnomon, leaning wearily away from the sun, a marble statue without a nose, and streaked about with green: like an army of desolation in single file, they revealed to Cosmo the age-long neglect of the place. Next appeared a wing built out from the back of the inner court ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald

... ten minutes," she announced. "Old Maudie's as punctual as a clock. She'll walk five times round the sundial and ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil

... heavens,—the ancient mansion, with its square chimneys, and bodyguard of old trees, and cincture of low walls with marble-pillared gateways,—the fields, with their various coverings,—the beds of flowers,—the plots of turf, one with a gray column in its centre bearing a sundial on which the rays of the moon were idly shining, another with a white stone and a narrow ridge of turf,—over all these objects, harmonized with all their infinite details into one fair whole by the moonlight, the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... footnote 3. Ut illum, etc.: may the gods confound him who first invented the hours, and who first placed a sundial in this city. Pity on me! They have cut up my day in compartments. Once when I was a boy my stomach was my clock, and it was much more fitting and reliable; it never failed to warn me except when there was nothing; now, even when there is something, there is no eating unless it so ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler

... part about the sundial, which he had noticed from the train when we went to Bexley Heath. It was rather a nice piece, ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit

... the drawing-room overhead, at my lord as he stood regarding the fountain. There was in the court a peculiar silence somehow; and the scene remained long in Esmond's memory;—the sky bright overhead; the buttresses of the building and the sundial casting shadow over the gilt memento mori inscribed underneath; the two dogs, a black greyhound and a spaniel nearly white, the one with his face up to the sun, and the other snuffing amongst the grass and stones, and my lord leaning over the fountain, which was ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... in the middle of the rose-garden, where a stone sundial stood—grey and weather-beaten, its warning motto half obliterated by the tender touches of ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler

... they left Cairo Street. "I should like you all to see the grotto with its specimens of the fauna of the country, among which is a remarkable bird called the gavila, which sings the half-hours with unvarying regularity, showing itself as correct as a sundial, and almost as useful as a ...
— Elsie at the World's Fair • Martha Finley

... clocks and watches were not common, a sundial was of great service to the public. This old dial, with its well-worn steps, is situated in the churchyard at the back of the Church, close to the footpath leading to the Vicarage. The view from the churchyard across to Bembridge ...
— Pictures in Colour of the Isle of Wight • Various

... and the Lieutenant were waiting for me in a little open space fifty yards from the house, where a narrower path crossed the broad walk, down which I had first seen Mademoiselle and her sister pacing. The Captain had removed his doublet, and stood in his shirt leaning against the sundial, his head bare and his sinewy throat uncovered. He had drawn his rapier and stood pricking the ground impatiently. I marked his strong and nervous frame and his sanguine air: and twenty years earlier the sight might ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman

... "but it wouldn't seem nat'ral if there wasn't that crack in the door to let the sunlight in o mornin's. Makes a kind o' sundial, you know. When the streak o' light's in that corner, I says 'six o'clock!' when it's across the chimney I ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte

... device faulty in this respect, represented a ball of crystal, the motto, from Plautus, Intus et in cute (The same within and without); crystal being devoid of skin (cutis), the expression was metaphorical. The introduction of negatives into the motto was considered good: as a sundial, with Ne aspiciatur non aspicitur (Unless looked upon—by the sun—it is not esteemed, or is of no use), a good device for a king's favourite; a flame of fire, with Nunquam deorsum (Never downwards); ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various

... happened before now in this rather rickety old manor house. Opening a door on the other side of the house, I passed out into the garden. How characteristic of the place!—a broad terrace running along the whole length of the house, and beyond that a few flower beds with the old sundial in their midst Beyond these a lawn, and then grass sweeping down to the edge of the river, some hundred yards away. Beyond the river again more grass, but of a wilder description, where the rabbits are scudding about or listening with pricked ears; and in the background a magnificent hanging wood, ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs

... provinces may be divined as we divine the history of a worthy tradesman when we read the epitaph on his tomb. To complete the mournful and tender impressions which seize the soul, on one of the walls there is a sundial graced with this homely Christian motto, ...
— La Grande Breteche • Honore de Balzac

... furnishing an old house like this one. It is like reviving an old garden. It may not be just your idea of a garden to begin with, but as you study it and deck its barren spaces with masses of color, and fit a sundial into the spot that so needs it, and give the sunshine a fountain to play with, you love the old garden just a little more every time you touch it, until it becomes to you the most beautiful ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe

... him for, but when he got home he explained that one might get along without such luxuries as clothing, but a good Geometry was a family necessity. About this time he made a water-clock, and also that sundial which can be seen today, carved into the stone on the corner of the house. He still continued his making of kites which had been begun at Grantham; and gave the superstitious neighbors a thrill by flying kites ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard

... heart Fanny's drawing-room with the low stretch of the Tudor windows at each end, their lattices panelled by the heavy mullions, the back one looking out on to the green garden bordered with wallflowers and tulips; the front one on to the round grass-plot and the sundial, the drive and the shrubbery beyond, down the broad walk that cut through it into the clear reaches of the park. She liked the interior, the Persian carpet faded to patches of grey and fawn and old rose, the port-wine mahogany furniture, the tables thrusting out the brass claws of their ...
— Mr. Waddington of Wyck • May Sinclair

... fell at David's feet. He had turned again to the beauties about him, and at that moment he spied the sundial—something he ...
— Just David • Eleanor H. Porter

... went down many steps, we saw the room in which Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, was imprisoned by Louis XII for eight years, and the little sundial that he made on the only spot on the wall that the sun could strike. He also whiled away the weary hours of captivity by painting frescoes on the walls, which are still to be seen. By such devices Ludovico probably saved his reason, but his health broke down ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton

... follow were inscribed to the sundial under the window of the hall of the House of ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward

... grandfather's clock, cuckoo clock, alarm clock, clock radio; watch, wristwatch, pocket watch, stopwatch, Swiss watch; atomic clock, digital clock, analog clock, quartz watch, water clock; chronometer, chronoscope^, chronograph; repeater; timekeeper, timepiece; dial, sundial, gnomon, horologe, pendulum, hourglass, clepsydra^; ghurry^. chronographer^, chronologer, chronologist, timekeeper; annalist. calendar year, leap year, Julian calendar, Gregorian calendar, Chinese calendar, Jewish calendar, perpetual calendar, Farmer's almanac, fiscal year. V. fix the time, mark ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... the west of England some two and a half centuries ago; an old-world garden, with prim yew hedges and a sundial, and, in one shady and sequestered nook, two persons standing; one, a man some forty years of age, tall and handsome, the other a lady of grace and beauty some fifteen years his junior. Both were cloaked and muffled and spoke in low and ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various



Words linked to "Sundial" :   timekeeper, gnomon, timepiece



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