person might have gathered in Packingtown -- those of the
various afflictions of the workers. When Jurgis had first
inspected the packing-plants with Szedvilas, he had mar~
velled while he listened to the tale of all the things that
were made out of the carcasses of animals, and of all the
lesser industries that were maintained there; now he
found that each one of these lesser industries was a
separate little inferno, in its way as horrible as the
killing-beds, the source and fountain of them all. The
workers in each of them had their own peculiar diseases.
And the wandering visitor might be skeptical about all
the swindles, but he could not be skeptical about these,
for the worker bore the evidence of them about on his
own person -- generally he had only to hold out his
hand.

There were the men in the pickle-rooms, for instance,
where old Antanas had gotten his death; scarce a one of
these that had not some spot of horror on his person.
Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a truck
in the pickle-rooms, and he might have a sore that would
put him out of the world; all the joints in his fingers
might be eaten by the acid, one by one. Of the butchers
and floorsmen, the beef-boners and trimmers, and all those
who used knives, you could scarcely find a person who
had the use of his thumb; time and time again the base
of it had been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh
against which the man pressed the knife to hold it. The
hands of these men would be criss-crossed with cuts, until
you could no longer pretend to count them or to trace
them. They would have no nails, -- they had worn them
off pulling hides; their knuckles were swollen so that
their fingers spread out like a fan. There were men who
worked in the cooking-rooms, in the midst of steam and
sickening odors, by artificial light; in these rooms the
germs of tuberculosis might live for two years, but the
supply was renewed every hour. There were the beef-
luggers, who carried two-hundred-pound quarters into
the refrigerator-cars; a fearful kind of work, that began
at four o'clock in the morning, and that wore out the

[[116]]

p115 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p116w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p117

v?