Quotation from: The Valley of the Moon

Written by: Jack London


With the two dollars she bought a sack of flour and half a sack
of potatoes. This relieved the monotony of her clams and mussels.
Like the Italian and Portuguese women, she gathered driftwood and
carried it home, though always she did it with shamed pride,
timing her arrival so that it would be after dark. One day, on
the mud-flat side of the Rock Wall, an Italian fishing boat
hauled up on the sand dredged from the channel. From the top of
the wall Saxon watched the men grouped about the charcoal
brazier, eating crusty Italian bread and a stew of meat and
vegetables, washed down with long draughts of thin red wine. She
envied them their freedom that advertised itself in the
heartiness of their meal, in the tones of their chatter and
laughter, in the very boat itself that was not tied always to one
place and that carried them wherever they willed. Afterward, they
dragged a seine across the mud-flats and up on the sand,
selecting for themselves only the larger kinds of fish. Many
thousands of small fish, like sardines, they left dying on the
sand when they sailed away. Saxon got a sackful of the fish, and
was compelled to make two trips in order to carry them home,
where she salted them down in a wooden washtubs.

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Old Dominion University CS Dept
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Created: 2007-2-22T12:35:29Z
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Part of a series of experiments in web preservation under the direction of Michael L. Nelson, Ph.D.