{"id":"01KG8AKFKT8EWBDH28D6REC8RV","cid":"bafkreibj2gzn6h3d72udccbpuiximd45d4rsjjcq3ed3rfyrki7wpdwdky","type":"chunk","properties":{"end_line":6925,"extracted_at":"2026-01-30T20:48:05.594Z","extracted_by":"structure-extraction-lambda","label":"Chunk 1","source_file":"01KG89J1DKC9HHJRKY25JZBEXW","start_line":6861,"text":"CHAPTER XXIII.\r\nISRAEL IN EGYPT.\r\n\r\n\r\nIt was a gray, lowering afternoon that, worn out, half starved, and\r\nhaggard, Israel arrived within some ten or fifteen miles of London, and\r\nsaw scores and scores of forlorn men engaged in a great brickyard.\r\n\r\nFor the most part, brickmaking is all mud and mire. Where, abroad, the\r\nbusiness is carried on largely, as to supply the London market, hordes\r\nof the poorest wretches are employed, their grimy tatters naturally\r\nadapting them to an employ where cleanliness is as much out of the\r\nquestion as with a drowned man at the bottom of the lake in the Dismal\r\nSwamp.\r\n\r\nDesperate with want, Israel resolved to turn brickmaker, nor did he\r\nfear to present himself as a stranger, nothing doubting that to such a\r\nvocation his rags would be accounted the best letters of introduction.\r\n\r\nTo be brief, he accosted one of the many surly overseers, or\r\ntaskmasters of the yard, who, with no few pompous airs, finally engaged\r\nhim at six shillings a week, almost equivalent to a dollar and a half.\r\nHe was appointed to one of the mills for grinding up the ingredients.\r\nThis mill stood in the open air. It was of a rude, primitive, Eastern\r\naspect, consisting of a sort of hopper, emptying into a barrel-shaped\r\nreceptacle. In the barrel was a clumsy machine turned round at its axis\r\nby a great bent beam, like a well-sweep, only it was horizontal; to\r\nthis beam, at its outer end, a spavined old horse was attached. The\r\nmuddy mixture was shovelled into the hopper by spavined-looking old\r\nmen, while, trudging wearily round and round, the spavined old horse\r\nground it all up till it slowly squashed out at the bottom of the\r\nbarrel, in a doughy compound, all ready for the moulds. Where the dough\r\nsqueezed out of the barrel a pit was sunken, so as to bring the moulder\r\nhere stationed down to a level with the trough, into which the dough\r\nfell. Israel was assigned to this pit. Men came to him continually,\r\nreaching down rude wooden trays, divided into compartments, each of the\r\nsize and shape of a brick. With a flat sort of big ladle, Israel\r\nslapped the dough into the trays from the trough; then, with a bit of\r\nsmooth board, scraped the top even, and handed it up. Half buried there\r\nin the pit, all the time handing those desolate trays, poor Israel\r\nseemed some gravedigger, or churchyard man, tucking away dead little\r\ninnocents in their coffins on one side, and cunningly disinterring them\r\nagain to resurrectionists stationed on the other.\r\n\r\nTwenty of these melancholy old mills were in operation. Twenty\r\nheartbroken old horses, rigged out deplorably in cast-off old cart\r\nharness, incessantly tugged at twenty great shaggy beams; while from\r\ntwenty half-burst old barrels, twenty wads of mud, with a lava-like\r\ncourse, gouged out into twenty old troughs, to be slapped by twenty\r\ntattered men into the twenty-times-twenty battered old trays.\r\n\r\nEre entering his pit for the first, Israel had been struck by the\r\ndismally devil-may-care gestures of the moulders. But hardly had he\r\nhimself been a moulder three days, when his previous sedateness of\r\nconcern at his unfortunate lot, began to conform to the reckless sort\r\nof half jolly despair expressed by the others. The truth indeed was,\r\nthat this continual, violent, helter-skelter slapping of the dough into\r\nthe moulds, begat a corresponding disposition in the moulder, who, by\r\nheedlessly slapping that sad dough, as stuff of little worth, was\r\nthereby taught, in his meditations, to slap, with similar heedlessness,\r\nhis own sadder fortunes, as of still less vital consideration. To these\r\nmuddy philosophers, men and bricks were equally of clay. “What\r\nsignifies who we be—dukes or ditchers?” thought the moulders; “all is\r\nvanity and clay.”\r\n\r","title":"Chunk 1"},"relationships":[{"peer":"01KG8AJJRTSPPV0WM71TZXDPYD","peer_type":"chapter","predicate":"in"},{"peer":"01KG89J1DKC9HHJRKY25JZBEXW","peer_type":"file","predicate":"extractedFrom"},{"peer":"01KG89HMDZKNY753EZE1CJ8HZW","peer_type":"collection","predicate":"collection"},{"peer":"01KG8AKFM0YDAP5EBH990CSN6H","peer_type":"chunk","predicate":"next"}],"ver":2,"created_at":"2026-01-30T20:48:05.754Z","ts":"2026-01-30T20:48:18.342Z","edited_by":{"method":"manual","user_id":"01KFF0H3YRP9ZSM033AM0QJ47H"}}