Volume Three—Chapter Two.
New Formosa—The Raft.
They did not get up till the sun was high, and when Mark lifted the curtain a robin flew from the table just outside, where he had been picking up the crumbs, across to the gate-post in the stockade. The gate had not been shut—Pan was lying by it under the fence, which cast a shadow in the morning and evening.
“Pan!” said Mark; the lazy spaniel wagged his tail, but did not come.
“I shall go and finish the sun-dial while you get the breakfast,” said Bevis. It was Mark’s turn to-day, and as he went out at the gate he stooped and patted Pan, who looked up with speaking affection in his eyes, and stretched himself to his full length in utter lassitude.
Bevis drew the line from the gnomon to the mark he had made the night before, this was the noon or meridian. Then he drew another from the mark where the shadow had fallen at four o’clock in the afternoon. The space between the two he divided into four equal divisions and drew lines for one, two, and three o’clock. They were nearly two inches apart, and having measured them exactly he added four more beyond, up to eight o’clock, as he thought the sun set about eight; and then seven more on the other side where the shadow would fall in the morning, as he supposed the sun rose about five.
His hours, therefore, ranged from five till eight, and he added half lines to show the half-hours. When it was done the shadow of the gnomon touched the nine, so he shouted to Mark that it was nine o’clock. He knew that his dial was not correct, because the hour lines ought to be drawn so as to show the time every day of the year, and his would only show it for a short while.
How often he had drawn a pencil-mark along the edge of the shadow on the window-frame in the south window of the parlour! In the early spring, while the bitter east wind raged, he used to sit in the old oak chair at the south window, where every now and then the warm sunshine fell from a break in the ranks of the marching clouds. Out of the wind the March sun was warm and pleasant, and while it lasted he dreamed over his books, his Odyssey, his Faust, his Quixote, his Shakespeare’s poems.