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Dark, stern, and forbidding, his face seamed with scars, he was a harsh master, a relentless foe, and a cruel tyrant to any who dared not resist his authority.
The marine officer was also a very excellent fellow, but he squinted awfully, which made him carry his head somewhat on one side; and his face was broad and strongly seamed with lines, which twisted in a way that made him look as if he was always laughing. He however did laugh very frequently, more especially at his own jokes, which, if not always original, were very amusing.
The side of the hill was seamed with small water worn gulches and strewn with rocks and the logs of fallen trees; and the trail down to the bottom wound and twisted and turned to avoid these obstructions, until it seemed to the impatient boys, that, for every step downward, they had to go a dozen steps to get around some gulch or huge rock or fallen tree; but, at last, they reached the bottom, and were actually on the very ground where men were digging gold out of the dirt.
It was a large, square, solid brick structure, set among oaks and sinister pines, once the home, or perhaps the mansion, of Banker Whiteley, but unoccupied for years. Leaves rotted before the deserted carriage-shed. The disregarded steps in front were seamed with shallow pools of water for days after a rain.
His features are "seamed by sickness, dimmed by sensuality, convulsed by passion, pinched by poverty, shadowed by sorrow, branded by remorse." Men's bodies are consumed by sloth, broken down by labor, tortured by disease, dishonored by foul uses, until beholding the "marks" of character in the natural face in a glass multitudes would fain forget what manner of men they are.
Their existence is truly wretched, and if it were not for the luxuriant chestnut-woods, which cover the sides of the narrow valleys or gorges with which the barren plateau is deeply seamed every few miles, the population of the region would be more scanty than it is, for the chestnut goes far to sustain the people through the worst months of the year.
The herbage is parched and withered; the brooks and streams are dried up; the buffalo, the elk and the deer have wandered to distant parts, keeping within the verge of expiring verdure, and leaving behind them a vast uninhabited solitude, seamed by ravines, the beds of former torrents, but now serving only to tantalize and increase the thirst of the traveller.
Over the rocks, in the crevice of which the candle burned, there was thrust out an evil yellow face, a terrible animal face, all seamed and scored with vile passions. Foul with mire, with a bristling beard, and hung with matted hair, it might well have belonged to one of those old savages who dwelt in the burrows on the hillsides.
The difficult ride led at first through a dark deep wood in clay soil that held water in every depression, seamed with steep eroded ravines and diversified by low passes over projecting spurs of a chain of mountains. There the monkeys and parrots furnished the tropical atmosphere, assisted somewhat by innumerable dead mules along the trail.
The end of the goad is shod with a sharp spike of steel, three inches or more long. Often we see these oxen dripping with blood, and seamed and scarred with wounds. Besides the pain of this constant goading, they suffer from flies upon their face, nose and eyes. Since their heads are bound, they can not shake the flies off. All day they stand or travel in the hot sun without water or food.
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