that blew chilly over this bleak
expanse added to that fancy, and the line of straggling whitewashed farm
buildings, that half way across lifted themselves above it, seemed to
be placed on an island in its midst. Even the one or two huge, misshapen
agricultural machines, abandoned in the furrows, bore an odd resemblance
to hulks or barges adrift upon its waste.

This marine suggestion was equally noticeable from the door of one of
the farm buildings--a long, detached wooden shed--into which a number of
farm laborers were slowly filing, although one man was apparently enough
impressed by it to linger and gaze over that rigid sea. Except in their
rough dress and the labor-stains of soil on their hands and faces, they
represented no particular type or class. They were young and old,
robust and delicate, dull and intelligent; kept together only by some
philosophical, careless, or humorous acceptance of equally enforced
circumstance in their labors, as convicts might have been. For they had
been picked up on the streets and wharves of San Francisco,--discharged
sailors, broken-down miners, helpless newcomers, unemployed professional
men, and ruined traders,--to assist in ploughing and planting certain
broad leagues of rich alluvial soil for a speculative Joint Stock
Company, at a weekly wage that would have made an European peasant
independent for half a year. Yet there was no enthusiasm in their labor,
although it was seldom marked by absolute laziness or evasion, and was
more often hindered by ill-regulated "spurts" and excessive effort,
as if the laborer was anxious to get through with it; for in the few
confidences they exchanged there was little allusion to the present, and
they talked chiefly of what they were going to do when their work was
over. They were gregarious only at their meals in one of the sheds, or
when at night they sought their "bunks" or berths together in the larger
building.

The man who had lingered to look at the dreary prospect had a somewhat
gloomy, discontented face, whose sensitive lines indicated a certain
susceptibility to such impressions. He was further distinguished by
having also lingered longer with the washing of his hands and face
in the battered tin basin on a stool beside the door, and by the
circumstance that the operation revealed the fact that they were whiter
than those of his companions. Drying his fingers slowly on the long
roller-towel, he stood gazing with a kind of hard abs