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 abstraction across the
darkening field, the strip of faded colorless shore, and the chill gray
sea, to the dividing point of land on the opposite coast, which in the
dying daylight was silhouetted against the cold horizon.

He knew that around that point and behind it lay the fierce, half-grown,
half-tamed city of yesterday that had worked his ruin.

It was scarcely a year ago that he had plunged into its wildest