Their Necks Grew Black, Much
Like Black Oak In Old Houses.
Their open chests were always bare, and
flat, and stark, and never rising with rounded bust-like muscle as the
Greek statues of athletes.
The breast-bone was burned black, and their arms, tough as ash, seemed
cased in leather. They grew visibly thinner in the harvest-field, and
shrunk together - all flesh disappearing, and nothing but sinew and muscle
remaining. Never was such work. The wages were low in those days, and it
is not long ago, either - I mean the all-year-round wages; the reaping was
piecework at so much per acre - like solid gold to men and women who had
lived on dry bones, as it were, through the winter. So they worked and
slaved, and tore at the wheat as if they were seized with a frenzy; the
heat, the aches, the illness, the sunstroke, always impending in the
air - the stomach hungry again before the meal was over, it was nothing.
No song, no laugh, no stay - on from morn till night, possessed with a
maddened desire to labour, for the more they could cut the larger the sum
they would receive; and what is man's heart and brain to money? So hard,
you see, is the pressure of human life that these miserables would have
prayed on their knees for permission to tear their arms from the socket,
and to scorch and shrivel themselves to charred human brands in the
furnace of the sun.
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