For its water Jerusalem used to rely mainly upon the winter rainfall to fill its cisterns.

Large holes, from eight to ten feet deep, had been dug for some distance by the Dhaïra natives, forming natural cisterns or tanks.

"My people, saith Jehovah, have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewn out for themselves underground cisterns, full of rents, that can hold no water....

So dried up were the wells and exhausted the cisterns and reservoirs that even the king's household began to suffer, and it was feared that the horses of the royal stables would perish.

A householder had merely to apply to the Military Governor for water, and a sanitary officer inspected the cistern, ordered it to be cleansed, and saw that this was done; then the Department of Public Health gave its certificate, and the engineers ran a pipe to the cistern and filled it, no matter what its capacity.

Emboldened by success, he mistakes the cistern for a fountain, and instantly taps his brain again.

While some asserted that the Peloponnesians had poisoned the cisterns of water, others referred the visitation to the wrath of the gods, and especially to Apollo, known by hearers of the Iliad as author of pestilence in the Greek host before Troy.

I never laughed at my landlady after she had told me her story, but I often cried,not those pattering tears that run off the eaves upon our neighbors' grounds, the stillicidium of self-conscious sentiment, but those which steal noiselessly through their conduits until they reach the cisterns lying round about the heart; those tears that we weep inwardly with unchanging features;such

They stand on an elevated stone step, so as to bring the cistern about mid-height of their body, and on the rough inclined level of its rim they slash and roll the clothes, or, opening them, flaunt them into the water, or gather them together, lifting their arms high above their heads, and always treating them with a violence which nothing but the coarsest material can resist.

Owing to the great height of the surrounding buildings, and my chambers being on the second floor, the interval between this wall and mine not a little resembled a huge square cistern.

Herod, as is well known, built many such cisterns near Jericho, where he had a palace.

The inner court should contain a cistern like a little fish pond into which the drainage from the eaves may collect: as here the cattle and swine and geese can drink and bathe in summer when they are driven in from work or pasture.

Oh! it is sad, that Christ is so little made use of, and that so many will forsake the fountain of living waters, and dig to themselves broken cisterns that can hold no water; and slight, despise, and undervalue the gospel of Christ, which bringeth life and immortality to light.