University of Virginia Library

23. CHAPTER XXIII.
ISRAEL IN EGYPT.

IT was a gray, lowering afternoon that, worn out, half
starved, and haggard, Israel arrived within some ten
or fifteen miles of London, and saw scores and scores
of forlorn men engaged in a great brickyard.

For the most part, brickmaking is all mud and mire.
Where, abroad, the business is carried on largely, as to
supply the London market, hordes of the poorest wretches
are employed, their grimy tatters naturally adapting them
to an employ where cleanliness is as much out of the
question as with a drowned man at the bottom of the
lake in the Dismal Swamp.

Desperate with want, Israel resolved to turn brickmaker,
nor did he fear to present himself as a stranger, nothing
doubting that to such a vocation his rags would be accounted
the best letters of introduction.

To be brief, he accosted one of the many surly over-seers,
or taskmasters of the yard, who, with no few
pompous airs, finally engaged him at six shillings a week,
almost equivalent to a dollar and a half. He was appointed

to one of the mills for grinding up the ingredients.
This mill stood in the open air. It was of a rude, primitive,
Eastern aspect, consisting of a sort of hopper,
emptying into a barrel-shaped receptacle. In the barrel
was a clumsy machine turned round at its axis by a great
bent beam, like a well-sweep, only it was horizontal; to
this beam, at its outer end, a spavined old horse was
attached. The muddy mixture was shovelled into the
hopper by spavined-looking old men, while, trudging
wearily round and round, the spavined old horse ground
it all up till it slowly squashed out at the bottom of
the barrel, in a doughy compound, all ready for the
moulds. Where the dough squeezed out of the barrel
a pit was sunken, so as to bring the moulder here
stationed down to a level with the trough, into which
the dough fell. Israel was assigned to this pit. Men
came to him continually, reaching down rude wooden
trays, divided into compartments, each of the size and
shape of a brick. With a flat sort of big ladle, Israel
slapped the dough into the trays from the trough; then,
with a bit of smooth board, scraped the top even, and
handed it up. Half buried there in the pit, all the time
handing those desolate trays, poor Israel seemed some
gravedigger, or churchyard man, tucking away dead little
innocents in their coffins on one side, and cunningly disinterring
them again to resurrectionists stationed on the
other.

Twenty of these melancholy old mills were in operation.
Twenty heartbroken old horses, rigged out deplorably
in cast-off old cart harness, incessantly tugged at

twenty great shaggy beams; while from twenty half-burst
old barrels, twenty wads of mud, with a lava-like course,
gouged out into twenty old troughs, to be slapped by
twenty tattered men into the twenty-times-twenty battered
old trays.

Ere entering his pit for the first, Israel had been struck
by the dismally devil-may-care gestures of the moulders.
But hardly had he himself been a moulder three days,
when his previous sedateness of concern at his unfortunate
lot, began to conform to the reckless sort of half
jolly despair expressed by the others. The truth indeed
was, that this continual, violent, helter-skelter slapping of
the dough into the moulds, begat a corresponding disposition
in the moulder, who, by heedlessly slapping that
sad dough, as stuff of little worth, was thereby taught,
in his meditations, to slap, with similar heedlessness, his
own sadder fortunes, as of still less vital consideration.
To these muddy philosophers, men and bricks were
equally of clay. “What signifies who we be—dukes or
ditchers?” thought the moulders; “all is vanity and clay.”
So slap, slap, slap, care-free and negligent, with bitter
unconcern, these dismal desperadoes flapped down the
dough. If this recklessness were vicious of them, be it
so; but their vice was like that weed which but grows
on barren ground; enrich the soil, and it disappears.

For thirteen weary weeks, lorded over by the taskmaster,
Israel toiled in his pit. Though this condemned
him to a sort of earthy dungeon, or gravedigger's hole,
while he worked, yet even when liberated to his meals,
naught of a cheery nature greeted him. The yard was

encamped, with all its endless rows of tented sheds, and
kilns, and mills, upon a wild waste moor, belted round
by bogs and fens. The blank horizon, like a rope, coiled
round the whole.

Sometimes the air was harsh and bleak; the ridged
and mottled sky looked scourged, or cramping fogs set
in from sea, for leagues around, ferreting out each rheumatic
human bone, and racking it; the sciatic limpers
shivered; their aguish rags sponged up the mists. No
shelter, though it hailed. The sheds were for the bricks.
Unless, indeed, according to the phrase, each man was a
“brick,” which, in sober scripture, was the case; brick
is no bad name for any son of Adam; Eden was but a
brickyard; what is a mortal but a few luckless shovelfuls
of clay, moulded in a mould, laid out on a sheet to dry,
and ere long quickened into his queer caprices by the
sun? Are not men built into communities just like
bricks into a wall? Consider the great wall of China:
ponder the great populace of Pekin. As man serves
bricks, so God him, building him up by billions into
edifices of his purposes. Man attains not to the nobility
of a brick, unless taken in the aggregate. Yet is there
a difference in brick, whether quick or dead; which, for
the last, we now shall see.