One evening they came over for a visit, and naturally the
first subject upon which the conversation turned was the
neighborhood and its history; and then Grandmother
Majauszkiene, as the old lady was called, proceeded to
recite to them a string of horrors that fairly froze their
blood. She was a wrinkled-up and wizened personage --
she must have been eighty -- and as she mumbled the grim
story through her toothless gums, she seemed a very old
witch to them. Grandmother Majauszkiene had lived in
the midst of misfortune so long that it had come to be her
element, and she talked about starvation, sickness, and death
as other people might about weddings and holidays.

The thing came gradually. In the first place as to the
house they had bought, it was not new at all, as they had
supposed; it was about fifteen years old, and there was
nothing new upon it but the paint, which was so bad that
it needed to be put on new every year or two. The house
was one of a whole row that was built by a company which
existed to make money by swindling poor people. The
family had paid fifteen hundred dollars for it, and it had
not cost the builders five hundred, when it was new --
Grandmother Majauszkiene knew that because her son
belonged to a political organization with a contractor who
put up exactly such houses. They used the very flim~
siest and cheapest material; they built the houses a dozen
at a time, and they cared about nothing at all except the
outside shine. The family could take her word as to the
trouble they would have, for she had been through it all
-- she and her son had bought their house in exactly the
same way. They had fooled the company, however, for
her son was a skilled man, who made as high as a hundred
dollars a month, and as he had had sense enough not to
marry, they had been able to pay for the house.

Grandmother Majauszkiene saw that her friends were
puzzled at this remark; they did not quite see how pay~
ing for the house was "fooling the company." Evidently
they were very inexperienced. Cheap as the houses were,
they were sold with the idea that the people who bought
them would not be able to pay for them. When they

[[77]]

p076 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p077w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p078

v?