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One of my associates in this locality, for two or three months, was a man who had had a university education; but now for eighteen years he had decayed there by inches, a bearded, rough-clad, clay-stained miner, and at times, among his sighings and soliloquizings, he unconsciously interjected vaguely remembered Latin and Greek sentences dead and musty tongues, meet vehicles for the thoughts of one whose dreams were all of the past, whose life was a failure; a tired man, burdened with the present, and indifferent to the future; a man without ties, hopes, interests, waiting for rest and the end.
Then the whole subject is seen clearly, like a newspaper; and the artist, if he is a realist, copies every patch on the trousers, and does not omit to tell us how many nails have fallen from the great clay-stained boots.
One of my associates in this locality, for two or three months, was a man who had had a university education; but now for eighteen years he had decayed there by inches, a bearded, rough-clad, clay-stained miner, and at times, among his sighings and soliloquizings, he unconsciously interjected vaguely remembered Latin and Greek sentences dead and musty tongues, meet vehicles for the thoughts of one whose dreams were all of the past, whose life was a failure; a tired man, burdened with the present, and indifferent to the future; a man without ties, hopes, interests, waiting for rest and the end.
Cabbage-tree hats or billycocks were on every head, and for the rest a gray or blue jumper tucked into Clay-stained trousers and Wellington boots satisfied the majority.
The hands that swung at his sides had been roughened by labor with pick and drill. Yet in spite of the old clay-stained shooting suit and shapeless slouch hat with the grease on the front of it, where a candle had been set, there was a stamp of command, and even refinement, about him.
It was the crude, half-finished shape of a recumbent female figure, of large proportions and abominable modelling, stretched out at full length upon a long, low trestle-supported "sculptor's staging," on which also lay Van Nant's modelling tools and his clay-stained working blouse.
Take a shoe a real, old shoe without a foot in it and it looks so foolish, betraying so mercilessly its owner's bumps and peculiar toes. There is pathos there, too. A scrub woman's run-down shoes, a kiddie's scuffed-out toes, a man's clumsy, clay-stained boots and the happy dancing slippers of a young girl. Back of the shoes the cobbler. Cobblers are always philosophers.
Then, at midnight, all to bed, except those foolish revellers who have stayed too late at the "grog shop". At dawn, again, they are all astir; for the day's supply of water must be drawn from the stream ere its limpid current begins to assume the appearance of a clay-stained gutter.
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