-springing to their hovering poise. The falling body clogged
the thing's return; so there it stood, still impending over Bannadonna,
as if whispering some post-mortem terror. The chisel lay dropped from
the hand, but beside the hand; the oil-flask spilled across the iron
track.

In his unhappy end, not unmindful of the rare genius of the mechanician,
the republic decreed him a stately funeral. It was resolved that the
great bell--the one whose casting had been jeopardized through the
timidity of the ill-starred workman--should be rung upon the entrance of
the bier into the cathedral. The most robust man of the country round
was assigned the office of bell-ringer.

But as the pall-bearers entered the cathedral porch, naught but a
broken and disastrous sound, like that of some lone Alpine land-slide,
fell from the tower upon their ears. And then, all was hushed.

Glancing backwards, they saw the groined belfry crashed sideways in. It
afterwards appeared that the powerful peasant, who had the bell-rope in
charge, wishing to test at once the full glory of the bell, had swayed
down upon the rope with one concentrate jerk. The mass of quaking metal,
too ponderous for its frame, and strangely feeble somewhere at its top,
loosed from its fastening, tore sideways down, and tumbling in one sheer
fall, three hundred feet to the soft sward below, buried itself inverted
and half out of sight.

Upon its disinterment, the main fracture was found to have started from
a small spot in the ear; which, being scraped, revealed a defect,
deceptively minute in the casting; which defect must subsequently have
been pasted over with some unknown compound.

The remolten metal soon reassumed its place in the tower's repaired
superstructure. For one year the metallic choir of birds sang musically
in its belfry-bough-work of sculptured blinds and traceries. But on the
first anniversary of the tower's completion--at early dawn, before the
concourse had surrounded it--an earthquake came; one loud crash was
heard. The stone-pine, with all its bower of songsters, lay overthrown
upon the plain.

So the blind slave obeyed its blinder lord; but, in obedience, slew him.
So the creator was killed by the creature. So the bell was too heavy for
the tower. So the bell's main weakness was where man's blood had flawed
it. And so pride went before the fall.

***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PIAZZA TALES***

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