take them to poni Aniele, who kept a boarding-house the
other side of the yards; old Mrs. Jukniene, he explained,
had not what one would call choice accommodations, but
they might do for the moment. To this Teta Elzbieta
hastened to respond that nothing could be too cheap to
suit them just then; for they were quite terrified over the
sums they had had to expend. A very few days of prac~
tical experience in this land of high wages had been suffi~
cient to make clear to them the cruel fact that it was also
a land of high prices, and that in it the poor man was
almost as poor as in any other corner of the earth; and so
there vanished in a night all the wonderful dreams of
wealth that had been haunting Jurgis. What had made
the discovery all the more painful was that they were
spending, at American prices, money which they had
earned at home rates of wages -- and so were really being
cheated by the world! The last two days they had all
but starved themselves -- it made them quite sick to
pay the prices that the railroad people asked them for
food.

Yet, when they saw the home of the Widow Jukniene
they could not but recoil, even so. In all their journey
they had seen nothing so bad as this. Poni Aniele had a
four-room flat in one of that wilderness of two-story frame
tenements that lie "back of the yards." There were four
such flats in each building, and each of the four was a
"boarding-house" for the occupancy of foreigners -- Lith~
uanians, Poles, Slovaks, or Bohemians. Some of these
places were kept by private persons, some were coopera~
tive. There would be an average of half a dozen boarders
to each room -- sometimes there were thirteen or fourteen
to one room, fifty or sixty to a flat. Each one of the oc~
cupants furnished his own accommodations -- that is, a
mattress and some bedding. The mattresses would be
spread upon the floor in rows -- and there would be
nothing else in the place except a stove. It was by no
means unusual for two men to own the same mattress in
common, one working by day and using it by night, and
the other working at night and using it in the daytime.

[[30]]

p029 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p030w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p031

v?