A LARGE cask of wine had been dropped and
broken, street. The accident had happened in getting it out of a cart; the cask
had tumbled out with a run, the hoops had burst, and it lay on the stones just
outside the door of the wine-shop, shattered like a walnut-shell.
All the people within reach had suspended
their business or their idleness, to run to the spot and drink the wine. The
rough, irregular stones of the street, pointing every way, and designed, one
might have thought, expressly to lame all living creatures that approached
them, had dammed it into little pools; these were surrounded, each by its own
jostling group or crowd, according to its size. Some men kneeled down, made
scoops of their two hands joined, and sipped, or tried to help women, who bent
over their shoulders to sip, before the wine had all run out between their
fingers. Others, men and women, dipped in the puddles with little mugs of
mutilated earthenware, or even with handkerchiefs from women's heads, which
were squeezed dry into infants mouths; others made small mud embankments, to
stem the wine as it ran; others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows,
darted here and there, to cut off little streams of wine that started away in
new directions; others devoted themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed pieces of
the cask licking, and even champing the moister wine-rotted fragments with
eager relish. There was no drainage to carry off the wine, and not only did it
all get taken up, but so much mud got taken up along with it, that there might
have been a scavenger in the street, if anybody acquainted with it could have
believed in such a miraculous presence.
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