hile, 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 twenty old troughs, to be slapped by twenty
tattered men into the twenty-times-twenty battered old trays.

Ere entering his pit for the first, Israel had been struck by the
dismally devil-may-care gestures of the moulders. But hardly had he
himself been a moulder three days, when his previous sedateness of
concern at his unfortunate lot, began to conform to the reckless sort of
half jolly despair expressed by the others. The truth indeed was, that
this continual, violent, helter-skelter slapping of the dough into the
moulds, begat a corresponding disposition in the moulder, who, by
heedlessly slapping that sad dough, as stuff of little worth, was
thereby taught, in his meditations, to slap, with similar heedlessness,
his own sadder fortunes, as of still less vital consideration. To these
muddy philosophers, men and bricks were equally of clay. "What signifies
who we be--dukes or ditchers?" thought the moulders; "all is vanity and
clay."

So slap, slap, slap, care-free and negligent, with bitter unconcern,
these dismal desperadoes flapped down the dough. If this recklessness
were vicious of them, be it so; but their vice was like that weed which
but grows on barren ground; enrich the soil, and it disappe