Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 3).djvu/605

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SUN-DIALS.
609

depicted a bird and a fly (which is marvellously realistic in treatment); the motto is supposed to infer a punning suggestion that they (the hours) fly. There is one very similar in the High-street at Marlborough. The one in Winchester College, to which reference has previously been made, is very like it in design. The same inscription with date 1739 is to be seen on the dial which surmounts a pillar in a garden at Rotherham; it is also to be seen on an old entrance to one of the canons' houses at Exeter, again at King's Lynn, at Ripley, and on Ingleton Church, Yorkshire.

In the picturesque old town of Rye, on a vertical dial (now upon the Town Hall), which was taken from the old Grammar School, when the windows were altered in the Jubilee year, are the mottoes—

"The solar shadow as it measures life,
It life resembles too."

and—

"Tempus edax rerum"
(Time, the devourer of all things).

Bishop Edmund Redyngton wrote the following quaint distiches, A.D. 1665, for a dial at Addington, Kent:—

Amyddst ye fflowres
I tell ye houres.

Tyme wanes awaye
As fflowres decaye.

Beyond ye tombe
Ffreshe fflowrets bloome.

Soe man shall ryse
Above ye skyes.

In the churchyard of the fine old Perpendicular church at Headcorn, Kent, built in the time of Edward IV., which still possesses some of its original stained glass, will be found the wreck of a dial (for it is little else), a sketch of which is given. The twisted wrought iron addition to the gnomon, which is nailed at its other end to the oak shaft, is apparently the work of a by no means over-skilful village Vulcan. The date on the dial is 1763, and it stands by a great oak said to be at least one thousand years old.

Winchester, too, is rich in dials; on the south wall of John Frommond's Chantry Chapel, Winchester College, on one of the buttresses, painted in black, and which weather will soon have completely effaced, is a quaint dial bearing date 1712.

In a window in the old election-chamber, now one of the masters' rooms, is a glass dial, oval in form, beautiful in colour, and bearing on a painted scroll the motto—"Ut umbra sic vita transit" (As a shadow so doth life pass).

On the south wall of the church of St. Maurice, with its grand old Norman door-way, is an ancient stone vertical sun-dial, which, curiously enough, has the hour-lines marked from 8 a.m. to