"Elusive" is the word for the Third Hour of the Night: veiled, cloaked, face turned away, the most contained position of any of the Hours, a tiny brown "animal of the night" sheltering shyly in her sleeve.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, much better known for her great abolitionist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, also wrote a poem inspired by two prints of nighttime Hours on her bedroom wall. One from her vase pours down the dreamy dew... clearly describes the Fifth Hour of the Night. One hovering with vailed [sic] brow and wavering robe Seems bearer of calm dreams like floating clouds...Hours of the night, for ever there unfolding Your purple shady robes, heavy and still! This could be the Fourth Hour of the Night, but "heavy and still" does not really capture her billowing veil and alert little owl; in tinted prints she is commonly garbed in rose and green. It is the Third Hour of the Night who is often, although not always, heavily draped in shady purple. Indeed, the Brooklyn Museum, who were kind enough to send us color photographs of their holding, have a spectral, lunar version whose mantle, over a pale peach robe, is silvery grey with gold embroidered hems.
Cameos of this Hour are far more elusive than prints. In the years that material has been gathered for this series of articles, we had seen only one small, poorly carved cameo depiction. A second has only recently surfaced. This Hour would seem well suited for a bracelet panel: her pose would more readily than some of her sisters' fit into the confined space; her empty hands spare the carver the task of rendering the type of minute details required to complete a number of the others. And yet carvers preferred more difficult figures. Perhaps she is too heavy and still, too lacking in drama for artisans to choose her. She could easily be mistaken for the pensive Muse Polyhymnia, or even the Virgin Mary. Maybe uncertainty over the small beast settled along her forearm was a deterrent.
Just what is that small beast? It is Killikelly who calls it, without specificity, an "animal of the night". Another source says it is a squirrel. Some who attempted to explicate these allegorical figures chose not to mention this little creature at all. More than one refer to it as (our favorite) "the lethargical marmot". (For American readers, who may not know what a marmot is, think of the American woodchuck or groundhog.) These are a couple of Italian marmots. They really do not seem like good sleeve pets and their tails are too short to fold over the back. Neither squirrels nor marmots are nocturnal.
A more likely candidate, although not one chosen by any other writer on the subject we have found, is the so-called fat or edible dormouse. (Once featured on Roman banquet menus, it is supposed to be protected today but is still eaten in some regions of Italy.) Small, furtive, nocturnal, with large eyes, a pointy nose and a long fluffy tail that can be curled over the back, it is surely a better match in both appearance and habits than any marmot, no matter how lethargical.
