24. CHAPTER XXIV.
CONTINUED.
ALL night long, men sat before the mouth of the kilns,
feeding them with fuel. A dull smoke—a smoke of
their torments—went up from their tops. It was curious
to see the kilns under the action of the fire, gradually
changing color, like boiling lobsters. When, at last, the
fires would be extinguished, the bricks being duly baked,
Israel often took a peep into the low vaulted ways at
the base, where the flaming fagots had crackled. The
bricks immediately lining the vaults would be all burnt
to useless scrolls, black as charcoal, and twisted into
shapes the most grotesque; the next tier would be a
little less withered, but hardly fit for service; and
gradually, as you went higher and higher along the successive
layers of the kiln, you came to the midmost ones,
sound, square, and perfect bricks, bringing the highest
prices; from these the contents of the kiln gradually
deteriorated in the opposite direction, upward. But the
topmost layers, though inferior to the best, by no means
presented the distorted look of the furnace-bricks. The
furnace-bricks were haggard, with the immediate blistering
of the fire—the midmost ones were ruddy with a
genial and tempered glow—the summit ones were pale
with the languor of too exclusive an exemption from the
burden of the blaze.
These kilns were a sort of temporary temples constructed
in the yard, each brick being set against its
neighbor almost with the care taken by the mason. But
as soon as the fire was extinguished, down came the kiln
in a tumbled ruin, carted off to London, once more to be
set up in ambitious edifices, to a true brickyard philosopher,
little less transient than the kilns.
Sometimes, lading out his dough, Israel could not but
bethink him of what seemed enigmatic in his fate. He
whom love of country made a hater of her foes—the
foreigners among whom he now was thrown—he who, as
soldier and sailor, had joined to kill, burn and destroy
both them and theirs—here he was at last, serving that
very people as a slave, better succeeding in making their
bricks than firing their ships. To think that he should
be thus helping, with all his strength, to extend the walls
of the Thebes of the oppressor, made him half mad.
Poor Israel! well-named—bondsman in the English
Egypt. But he drowned the thought by still more recklessly
spattering with his ladle: “What signifies who we
be, or where we are, or what we do?” Slap-dash!
“Kings as clowns are codgers—who ain't a nobody?”
Splash! “All is vanity and clay.”
