due to the repulsiveness of the work; at any rate, the
people who worked with their hands were a class apart,
and were made to feel it.

In the late spring the canning-factory started up again, and
so once more Marija was heard to sing, and the love-music
of Tamoszius took on a less melancholy tone. It was not
for long, however; for a month or two later a dreadful
calamity fell upon Marija. Just one year and three days
after she had begun work as a can-painter, she lost her
job.

It was a long story. Marija insisted that it was because
of her activity in the union. The packers, of course, had
spies in all the unions, and in addition they made a prac~
tice of buying up a certain number of the union officials, as
many as they thought they needed. So every week they
received reports as to what was going on, and often they
knew things before the members of the union knew them.
Any one who was considered to be dangerous by them
would find that he was not a favorite with his boss; and
Marija had been a great hand for going after the foreign
people and preaching to them. However that might be,
the known facts were that a few weeks before the factory
closed, Marija had been cheated out of her pay for three
hundred cans. The girls worked at a long table, and
behind them walked a woman with pencil and notebook,
keeping count of the number they finished. This woman
was, of course, only human, and sometimes made mistakes;
when this happened, there was no redress -- if on Saturday
you got less money than you had earned, you had to make
the best of it. But Marija did not understand this, and
made a disturbance. Marija's disturbances did not mean
anything, and while she had known only Lithuanian and
Polish, they had done no harm, for people only laughed
at her and made her cry. But now Marija was able to call
names in English, and so she got the woman who made
the mistake to disliking her. Probably, as Marija claimed,
she made mistakes on purpose after that; at any rate, she
made them, and the third time it happened Marija went
on the war-path and took the matter first to the forelady,

[[122]]

p121 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p122w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p123

v?