and sold them. He had been in jail only three days for
it, and had come out laughing, and had not even lost his
place in the packing-house. He had gone all to ruin with
the drink, however, and lost his power; one of his sons,
who was a good man, had kept him and the family up for
a year or two, but then he had got sick with consumption.

That was another thing, Grandmother Majauszkiene
interrupted herself -- this house was unlucky. Every
family that lived in it, someone was sure to get con~
sumption. Nobody could tell why that was; there must
be something about a house, or the way it was built --
some folks said it was because the building had been
begun in the dark of the moon. There were dozens of
houses that way in Packingtown. Sometimes there would
be a particular room that you could point out -- if any~
body slept in that room he was just as good as dead.
With this house it had been the Irish first, and then a
Bohemian family had lost a child of it -- though, to be
sure, that was uncertain, since it was hard to tell what
was the matter with children who worked in the yards.
In those days there had been no law about the age of
children -- the packers had worked all but the babies.
At this remark the family looked puzzled, and Grand~
mother Majauszkiene again had to make an explanation --
that it was against the law for children to work before
they were sixteen. What was the sense of that? they
asked. They had been thinking of letting little Stani~
slovas go to work. Well, there was no need to worry,
Grandmother Majauszkiene said -- the law made no differ~
ence except that it forced people to lie about the ages of
their children. One would like to know what the law~
makers expected them to do; there were families that had
no possible means of support except the children, and
the law provided them no other way of getting a living.
Very often a man could get no work in Packingtown for
months, while a child could go and get a place easily;
there was always some new machine, by which the packers
could get as much work out of a child as they had been able
to get out of a man, and for a third of the pay.

[[80]]

p079 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p080w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p081

v?