while he told them what that meant. It seemed that he
was working in the room where the men prepared the beef
for canning, and the beef had lain in vats full of chemicals,
and men with great forks speared it out and dumped it
into trucks, to be taken to the cooking-room. When they
had speared out all they could reach, they emptied the vat
on the floor, and then with shovels scraped up the balance
and dumped it into the truck. This floor was filthy, yet
they set Antanas with his mop slopping the "pickle"
into a hole that connected with a sink, where it was caught
and used over again forever; and if that were not enough,
there was a trap in the pipe, where all the scraps of meat
and odds and ends of refuse were caught, and every few
days it was the old man's task to clean these out, and
shovel their contents into one of the trucks with the rest
of the meat!

This was the experience of Antanas; and then there
came also Jonas and Marija with tales to tell. Marija was
working for one of the independent packers, and was quite
beside herself and outrageous with triumph over the sums
of money she was making as a painter of cans. But one
day she walked home with a pale-faced little woman who
worked opposite to her, Jadvyga Marcinkus by name, and
Jadvyga told her how she, Marija, had chanced to get her
job. She had taken the place of an Irish woman who had
been working in that factory ever since anyone could re~
member, for over fifteen years, so she declared. Mary
Dennis was her name, and a long time ago she had been
seduced, and had a little boy; he was a cripple, and an
epileptic, but still he was all that she had in the world to
love, and they had lived in a little room alone somewhere
back of Halsted Street, where the Irish were. Mary had
had consumption, and all day long you might hear her
coughing as she worked; of late she had been going all to
pieces, and when Marija came, the "forelady" had sud~
denly decided to turn her off. The forelady had to come
up to a certain standard herself, and could not stop for
sick people, Jadvyga explained. The fact that Mary had
been there so long had not made any difference to her --

[[72]]

p071 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p072w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p073

v?