"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 disappears.
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.