Ona was blue-eyed and fair, while Jurgis had great
black eyes with beetling brows, and thick black hair that
curled in waves about his ears -- in short, they were one
of those incongruous and impossible married couples with
which Mother Nature so often wills to confound all proph~
ets, before and after. Jurgis could take up a two-hundred-
and-fifty-pound quarter of beef and carry it into a car
without a stagger, or even a thought; and now he stood
in a far corner, frightened as a hunted animal, and obliged
to moisten his lips with his tongue each time before he
could answer the congratulations of his friends.

Gradually there was effected a separation between the
spectators and the guests -- a separation at least suffi~
ciently complete for working purposes. There was no
time during the festivities which ensued when there were
not groups of onlookers in the doorways and the corners;
and if any one of these onlookers came sufficiently close,
or looked sufficiently hungry, a chair was offered him, and
he was invited to the feast. It was one of the laws of
the _veselija_ that no one goes hungry; and, while a rule
made in the forests of Lithuania is hard to apply in the
stock-yards district of Chicago, with its quarter of a mill~
ion inhabitants, still they did their best, and the children
who ran in from the street, and even the dogs, went out
again happier. A charming informality was one of the
characteristics of this celebration. The men wore their
hats, or, if they wished, they took them off, and their coats
with them; they ate when and where they pleased, and
moved as often as they pleased. There were to be speeches
and singing, but no one had to listen who did not care to;
if he wished, meantime, to speak or sing himself, he was
perfectly free. The resulting medley of sound distracted
no one, save possibly alone the babies, of which there were
present a number equal to the total possessed by all the
guests invited. There was no other place for the babies to
be, and so part of the preparations for the evening consisted
of a collection of cribs and carriages in one corner. In
these the babies slept, three or four together, or wakened
together, as the case might be. Those who were still

[[3]]

p002 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p003w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p004

v?