ful things in the entire plant. Presumably sausages were
once chopped and stuffed by hand, and if so it would be
interesting to know how many workers had been displaced
by these inventions. On one side of the room were the
hoppers, into which men shoveled loads of meat and
wheelbarrows full of spices; in these great bowls were
whirling knives that made two thousand revolutions a
minute, and when the meat was ground fine and adulter~
ated with potato-flour, and well mixed with water, it was
forced to the stuffing-machines on the other side of the
room. The latter were tended by women; there was a
sort of spout, like the nozzle of a hose, and one of the
women would take a long string of "casing" and put the
end over the nozzle and then work the whole thing on, as
one works on the finger of a tight glove. This string
would be twenty or thirty feet long, but the woman
would have it all on in a jiffy; and when she had several
on, she would press a lever, and a stream of sausage-meat
would be shot out, taking the casing with it as it came.
Thus one might stand and see appear, miraculously born
from the machine, a wriggling snake of sausage of incred~
ible length. In front was a big pan which caught these
creatures, and two more women who seized them as fast
as they appeared and twisted them into links. This was
for the uninitiated the most perplexing work of all; for
all that the woman had to give was a single turn of the
wrist; and in some way she contrived to give it so that
instead of an endless chain of sausages, one after another,
there grew under her hands a bunch of strings, all dan~
gling from a single center. It was quite like the feat of a
prestidigitator -- for the woman worked so fast that the
eye could literally not follow her, and there was only a
mist of motion, and tangle after tangle of sausages appear~
ing. In the midst of the mist, however, the visitor would
suddenly notice the tense set face, with the two wrinkles
graven in the forehead, and the ghastly pallor of the
cheeks; and then he would suddenly recollect that it
was time he was going on. The woman did not go on;
she stayed right there -- hour after hour, day after day,

[[158]]

p157 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p158w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p159

v?