Chapter 23

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 overseers, 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