found some that had gone to the bad. Formerly these
had been sold as "Number Three Grade," but later on
some ingenious person had hit upon a new device, and
now they would extract the bone, about which the bad
part generally lay, and insert in the hole a white-hot iron.
After this invention there was no longer Number One, Two,
and Three Grade -- there was only Number One Grade.
The packers were always originating such schemes -- they
had what they called "boneless hams," which were all the
odds and ends of pork stuffed into casings; and "Cali~
fornia hams," which were the shoulders, with big knuckle-
joints, and nearly all the meat cut out; and fancy "skinned
hams," which were made of the oldest hogs, whose skins
were so heavy and coarse that no one would buy them --
that is, until they had been cooked and chopped fine and
labeled "head cheese"!

It was only when the whole ham was spoiled that it came
into the department of Elzbieta. Cut up by the two-
thousand-revolutions-a-minute flyers, and mixed with half
a ton of other meat, no odor that ever was in a ham could
make any difference. There was never the least attention
paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come
all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been
rejected, and that was moldy and white -- it would be
dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the
hoppers, and made over again for home consumption.
There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor,
in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped
and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There
would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the
water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands
of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these
storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand
over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the
dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the
packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they
would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into
the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no joke;
the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who

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v?