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Can You Solve This Old-Timey Riddle? #5

This 19th-century riddle was created by the British Museum’s librarian—can you figure it out?

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John Winter Jones was a 19th-century English librarian and antiquarian, best known during his lifetime for being principal librarian of London’s British Museum. In addition to his work collecting and organizing the museum’s immense collection of books (a job that came with a book-buying budget of £10,000), Jones was also a prolific author in his own right, and published numerous non-fiction titles throughout his life. They included scholarly anthologies of classical quotations and essays on human culture, and in 1822, Jones published a collection of Riddles, Charades, and Conundrums.

What Jones called his “charades” were in fact a series of fiendish wordplay puzzles in which readers were given a series of hints to the individual syllables of a word, and then one final clue to the identity of the word as a whole. With that in mind, can you work out what two-syllable object this deceptively simple charade is describing?

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