and the brew from which it came. For the odors in these
ghastly charnel-houses there may be words in Lithuanian,
but there are none in English. The person entering
would have to summon his courage as for a cold-water
plunge. He would go on like a man swimming under
water; he would put his handkerchief over his face, and
begin to cough and choke; and then, if he were still obsti~
nate, he would find his head beginning to ring, and the
veins in his forehead to throb, until finally he would be
assailed by an overpowering blast of ammonia fumes,
and would turn and run for his life, and come out
half-dazed.

On top of this were the rooms where they dried the
"tankage," the mass of brown stringy stuff that was left
after the waste portions of the carcasses had had the lard
and tallow tried out of them. This dried material they
would then grind to a fine powder, and after they had
mixed it up well with a mysterious but inoffensive
brown rock which they brought in and ground up by the
hundreds of carloads for that purpose, the substance was
ready to be put into bags and sent out to the world as any
one of a hundred different brands of standard bone-phos~
phate. And then the farmer in Maine or California or
Texas would buy this, at say twenty-five dollars a ton,
and plant it with his corn; and for several days after the
operation the fields would have a strong odor, and the
farmer and his wagon and the very horses that had
hauled it would all have it too. In Packingtown the
fertilizer is pure, instead of being a flavoring, and instead
of a ton or so spread out on several acres under the open
sky, there are hundreds and thousands of tons of it in one
building, heaped here and there in haystack piles, cover~
ing the floor several inches deep, and filling the air with a
choking dust that becomes a blinding sand-storm when the
wind stirs.

It was to this building that Jurgis came daily, as if
dragged by an unseen hand. The month of May was an
exceptionally cool one, and his secret prayers were granted;
but early in June there came a record-breaking hot spell,

[[153]]

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v?