The purpose of having two or three bulbs went beyond that of the original invention of the _subulo_ pattern, and was, I imagine, an ingenious device to provide that the player should be able to transpose the reed from one bulb to the other in order to play in a different mode or key, virtually without altering the disposition of the fingers; lengthening the pipe by transferring the reed higher, or shortening the effective sounding length of the pipe by placing the reed in the next lower or in the lowest bulb of the three: thus the player would have the choice of three modes or keys, whilst his pipes would remain outwardly the same. The bulb forms an artificial mouth, as was the custom many centuries later in the _cap_ of the _cromorne_. The position of the reed determines the effective length of the pipe; the difference of pitch would be in each case one tone, as I find that the length of bulb corresponds with the distance between two finger holes of the pipe. Does this solve the mystery? Be that as it may, I have found in these vases a source of ever renewed pleasure. Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. Tombs, tombs of a dozen buried cities, once gay with life, full of the daily sympathy of pleasure, and no less of sorrow. They gave the dead their gold and silver and jewels; they gave them food, fruits, oil and wine, and left them to silence and slow time. These lovely _Amphoræ_ buried, these festal _Kraters_ empty,—and once brimmed with wine! We think, irresistibly drawn to think of them, with Keats’s longing wish:— O for a draught of vintage, that hath been Cool’d a long age in the deep delvèd earth. The chamber had been rifled a thousand years or more; gold and ornaments gone, only the dust and the skeletons of men and women, young men and maidens,—the most perishable of things, the vases the most enduring. The owners bought their burial land “in perpetuity;” and, like the old Egyptians, they builded for a very brief and rudely broken eternity. CHAPTER VI. In the Land of Greece. FROM ETRURIA TO ATHENS. What a merry lot those _Subulones_ were, piping to song and dance and good cheer. I have been laughing over an Etruscan picture of one of these jovial fellows laying down on the grass upon his back, all the time lustily playing his pipes, and kicking his legs in the air, in sheer exuberance of merriment. And I have wondered what could that music be which so evidently was a never failing source of enjoyment to him, and to his race.