Boys -- Juvenile fiction; England -- Juvenile fiction
Kaak! Kaak! Another heron called and his discordant piercing yell
sounded over the water, seeming to penetrate to the distant and shadowy
shores. The noise awoke him, and he went down to the hut. Mark was
firm asleep, the lantern burned in the niche; Pan had been curled up by
the bedside, but lifted his head and wagged his tail, thumping the floor
as he entered. Bevis let down the curtain closing the doorway, put out
the lantern, and in three minutes was as firm as Mark. After some time,
Pan rose quietly and went out, slipping under the curtain, which fell
back into its place when he had passed.
Volume Three, Chapter II.
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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