ars.

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.

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 t