THE REFORMATION OF JAMES REDDY.


I.


It was a freshly furrowed field, so large that the eye at first
scarcely took in its magnitude. The irregular surface of upturned, oily,
wave-shaped clods took the appearance of a vast, black, chopping sea,
that reached from the actual shore of San Francisco Bay to the low hills
of the Coast Range. The sea-breeze 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