Buckets.
67
Chap. 9.]
stroy their species; and to produce an amount of misery, as evinced in theshrieks of the wounded—the agonies of the dying—the unutterablepangs of widows, and the untold sufferings of orphans—thar, would sufficeto draw tears fromdemons! Andali thisforwhat 1 Why, atone time,accord-inc to Tasso, and it is degradingto our nature to repeat it, because somethie ves of Modena stole a bttcket belonging to a public well of Bologna ! Thisfatal bücket is still preserved in the cathedra! of Modena —a memorialof a sanguinary war, and of the evils attending the most horrible of allhuman delusions, military glory .
“ln the year 1005, some soldiers of the Commonwealth of Modena ranaway with a bücket from a public well, belonging to the State of Bologna.This implement might be worth a Shilling; but it produced a bloodyquarrel which was worked up into a bloody war. Henry, the king ofSardinia , for the Emperor Henry the second, assisted the Modenese tokeep possession of the bücket; and in one of the battles he was madeprisoner. His father, the Emperor, offered a chain of gold that wouldencirele Bologna, which is seven miles in compass, for his son’s ransom,but in vain. After twenty-two years imprisonment, and his father beingdead, he pined away and died. His monument is still extant in thechurch of the Dominicans. This fatal bücket is still exhibited in thetower of the cathedral of Modena , enolosed in an iron cage.”
Materials of Buckets. —Neptune and Andromache watered horseswith metallic ones. Both Greeks and Romans had them of wood, metaland leather. Sometimes wooden ones were hooped with brass. One ofthese was found in a Roman barrow in England. The ancient British had them without hoops and cut out of solid timber. The Anglo Saxons made them of staves as at present. Those of the old Egyptians wereof metal, wood, skins or leather, and probably of earthenware. Seefigures in llth and 13th chapters. We have given figures of some metallicones discovered in Pompeii , in Book II. The bücket of Bologna isformed of staves and bound with iron hoops. 3
The old error that ‘ water has no weight in water,’ arose from not per-ceiving the weight of a bücket, until it was raised out of the liquid inwhich it was plunged.
Although pöetry is foreign to the design of this work, and cold wateris not remarkably inspiring, nor a bücket a very poetical object, yet thefollowing beautiful lines of S. Woodworth, on ‘The Bücket,’ are as re-freshing in the midst of a dry discussion, as a draught of the sparkling li-quid to a weary traveller of the desert. b
' That moss-covered vessel I hail as a treasure;
For often at noon, when returned from the field,
I found it the source of an exquisite pleasure,
The puresl and sweetest that nature can yield.
How ardent I seized it, with hands that were glowing,
And quick to the white-pebbled bottom it feil:
Then soon, with the emblem of truth overflowing,
And dripping with coolness, it rose from the well.
How sweet from the green mössy brim-to receive it,
As poised on the curb it inclined to my lips !
Not afull blushing goblet could tempt me to leave it,
Though filled with the nectar that Jupiter sips.