n's clothing, having found some mouldy
old rags on the banks of a stagnant pond, nigh a rickety building, which
looked like a poorhouse--clothing not improbably, as he surmised, left
there on the bank by some pauper suicide. Marvel not that he should with
avidity seize these rags; what the suicides abandon, the living hug.

Once more in beggar's garb, the fugitive sped towards London, prompted
by the same instinct which impels the hunted fox to the wilderness; for
solitudes befriend the endangered wild beast, but crowds are the
security, because the true desert, of persecuted man. Among the things
of the capital, Israel for more than forty years was yet to disappear,
as one entering at dusk into a thick wood. Nor did ever the German
forest, nor Tasso's enchanted one, contain in its depths more things of
horror than eventually were revealed in the secret clefts, gulfs, caves
and dens of London.

But here we anticipate a page.

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 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,
w