Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/84

 68 shadow of the third stick from the mid-day gnomon will then fall on the central stick, and the shepherd will know that it is time to start.

Another form of turf dial is photographed in Fig. 7, and is much more similar to the ordinary garden sundial. The central stick is the gnomon, and a stick notched for the hours is laid across the ends of two other sticks pointing due north and due east. I have also seen hour sticks placed at regular intervals from north to east for the shadow of the central gnomon to fall upon them.

The only reference I have been able to find to the former use of these turf dials by shepherds occurs in Shakespeare's King Henry VI., Third Part, Act ii. Sc. v., but perhaps refers to a more elaborate turf copy of the ordinary dial than those described:

The late Mrs. Gatty writes (The Book of Sun-dials, edit. 1900, p. 24), that "to 'carve out dials' was the way in which the shepherd boy beguiled his time," and apparently supposes the above passage to refer to the carving out of portable sundials. Such portable sundials were well known in the fourteenth century, and in the following century they grew to be regarded as