A GARDEN IN VENICE 



and proved salt, and as in other wells made here 

 the same thing happens it would lead one to 

 suppose that the Venice islands are floating on a 

 subterranean sea. 



When, on the fourteenth of July last year, the 

 Campanile of San Marco fell — that Gentiluomo, 

 as the people called it, because it did no one any 

 harm — I thought at first that the great shaft, 

 with its hundred and twenty yards in height, 

 had pierced the tired foundation and gone to the 

 bottom of this sea, wherever that bottom might 

 be, but a look at the debris half an hour after it 

 fell, when the air was still thick with its dust, 

 showed that it was the shaft itself, not the founda- 

 tion, that gave way, crushed to powder by its 

 own weight. 



Below the subterranean water we came to a 

 stratum of rock, through which the steel-pointed 

 lower tube was driven with the greatest difficulty, 

 blow on blow of the heavy hammer making 

 scarcely a line-breadth's impression on resistance 

 so great that at last the main tube was fractured 

 with the concussion. Then the part above the 

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