busy dwelling-places; frequently, also, a well-filled dove-cote.
Sometimes was seen a sun-dial--once the every-day friend and suggestive
monitor of all who wandered among the flowers of an hour; now known,
alas! only to the antiquary. Sentiment and even spirituality seem
suggested by the sun-dial, yet few remain to cast their instructive
shadow before our sight.

One stood for years in the old box-bordered garden at Homogansett Farm,
at Wickford, in old Narragansett. Governor Endicott's dial is in the
Essex Institute, at Salem; and my forbear, Jacob Fairbanks, had one
dated 1650, which is now in the rooms of the Dedham Historical Society.
Dr. Bowditch, of Boston, had a sun-dial which was thus inscribed:--

"With warning hand I mark Times rapid flight
From life's glad morning to its solemn night.
And like God's love I also show
Theres light above me, by the shade below."

Another garden dial thus gives, "in long, lean letters," its warning
word:--

"You'll mend your Ways To-morrow
When blooms that budded Flour?
Mortall! Lern to your Sorrow
Death may creep with his Arrow
And pierce yo'r vitall Marrow
Long ere my warning Shadow
Can mark that Hour."

These dials are all of heavy metal, usually lead; sometimes with gnomon
of brass. But I have heard of one which was unique; it was cut in box.

At the edge of the farm garden often stood the well-sweep, one of the
most picturesque adjuncts of the country dooryard. Its successor, the
roofed well with bucket, stone, and chain, and even the homely
long-handled pump, had a certain appropriateness as part of the garden
furnishings.

So many thoughts crowd upon us in regard to the old garden; one is the
age of its flowers. We have no older inhabitants than these garden
plants; they are old settlers. Clumps of flower-de-luce, double
buttercups, peonies, yellow day-lilies, are certainly seventy-five years
old. Many lilac bushes a century old still bloom in New England, and
syringas and flowering currants are as old as the elms and locusts that
shade them.

This established constancy and yearly recurrence of bloom is one of the
garden's many charms. To those who have known and loved an old garden in
which,

"There grow no strange flowers every year,
But when spring winds blow o'er the pleasant places,
The same dear things lift up the same fair faces,"

and faithfully tell and retell the story of the ch