What cheerful and appropriate furnishings the old-time gardens had; benches full of straw beeskepes and wooden beehives, those homelike and 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 changing seasons by their growth, blossom, and decay, nothing can seem more artificial than the modern show-beds of full-grown plants which are removed by assiduous gardeners as soon as they have flowered, to be replaced by others, only in turn to bloom and disappear. These seem to form a real garden no more than does a child's posy-bed stuck with short-stemmed flowers to wither in a morning.