I was so impatient to see how my lawn was going to look that I went to the shed to hunt up a dummy sundial post which I could set up and mark off my beds around it, getting them manured for planting. At first I could find nothing, except some old logs, but looking up presently into a loft under the eaves, I saw the dusty end of what looked like a Doric pillar poking out. I scrambled up and pulled forth, to my joy, a wooden pillar about nine feet long, in excellent preservation. How it got there, I had no idea. The dust had evidently accumulated on it for years. It had once been painted white. I dragged the heavy column down, and ran to get Hard Cider.
He grunted. “All yer side porch pillars wuz them kind when I wuz a boy,” he said. “Old man Noble’s fust wife didn’t like the porch–thought it kept light out o’ the kitchen, an’ hed it took down. His second wife hed it put back, but some o’ the columns hed got lost, or burnt up, I reckon, so’s they put it back with them square posts yer hev now. I reckon that column’s nigh on a century old.”
I sawed off the upper four feet carefully, and stowed the remainder back in the loft. Then I made a square base of planking, a temporary one till I could build a brick foundation, washed off the dust, and took my pedestal around to the lawn. With a ball of twine tied to the centre of the south room door I ran a line directly out to the rose trellis, and midway between the trellis and where the edge of my pergola was to be I placed the pillar. Then I took out my knife, and thrust the blade lightly in at an angle, to simulate the dial marker, and turned to call Miss Goodwin.
But she was already standing in the door.
“Oh!” she cried, running lightly down the plank and across the ground, “a sundial already, and a real pedestal! Come away from it a little, and see how it seems to focus all the sunlight.”
We stood off near the house, and looked at the white column in mid-lawn. It did indeed seem to draw in the sunlight to this level spot before the dwelling, even though it rose from the brown earth instead of rich greensward, and even though beyond it was but the unsightly, half-finished, naked trellis. Even as we watched, a bird came swooping across the lawn, alighted on my knife handle, and began to carol.
“Oh, the darling!” cried Miss Goodwin. “He understands!”
I was very well content. I had unexpectedly found a pedestal, and was experiencing for the first time the real sensation of garden warmth and intimacy and focussed light which a sundial, rightly placed, can bring. I did not speak, and presently beside me I heard a voice saying, “But I forgot that I am angry at you.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you had no right to leave me to pick out the paint for your dining-room,” said she.