The Reformation of James Reddy

By Bret Harte

James Reddy is working on a farm as a labourer- but from circumstance, not choice. He has a pretty poor opinion of women which amounts to not much more than disdain. His reformation begins when he meets the daughter of his employer. She clearly likes him and he decides he will use this to his advantage, though possibly not to hers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Good Press
• Release date: Dec 8, 2020
• ISBN: 4064066414559

Bret Harte

Bret Harte (1836–1902) was an author and poet known for his romantic depictions of the American West and the California gold rush. Born in New York, Harte moved to California when he was seventeen and worked as a miner, messenger, and journalist. In 1868 he became editor of the Overland Monthly, a literary journal in which he published his most famous work, “The Luck of Roaring Camp.” In 1871 Harte returned east to further his writing career. He spent his later years as an American diplomat in Germany and Britain.

Book preview

Bret Harte

The Reformation of James Reddy

Published by Good Press, 2020

[e-mail]

EAN 4064066414559

Table of Contents

Cover

Titlepage

Text

The Reformation of James Reddy

Table of Contents

IT was a freshly furrowed field, so large that the eye at first scarcely took in its magnitude. The irregular surface of upturned, oily, wave-shaped clods took the appearance of a vast, black, chopping sea, that reached from the actual shore of San Francisco Bay to the low hills of the Coast Range. The sea-breeze that blew chilly over this bleak expanse added to that fancy, and the line of straggling whitewashed farm buildings, that half-way across lifted themselves above it, seemed to be placed on an island in its midst. Even the one or two huge, misshapen agricultural machines, abandoned in the furrows, bore an odd resemblance to hulks or barges adrift upon its waste.

This marine suggestion was equally noticeable from the door of one of the farm buildings—a long, detached wooden shed—into which a number of farm laborers were slowly filing, although one man was apparently enough impressed by it to linger and gaze over that rigid sea. Except in their rough dress and the labor-stains of soil on their hands and faces, they represented no particular type or class. They were young and old, robust and delicate, dull and intelligent; kept together only by some philosophical, careless, or humorous acceptance of equally enforced circumstance in their labors, as convicts might have been. For they had been picked up on the streets and wharves of San Francisco—discharged sailors, broken-down miners, helpless new-comers, 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