did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even
when he saw one -- there were things that went into the
sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a
tidbit. There was no place for the men to wash their
hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a
practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled
into the sausage. There were the butt-ends of smoked
meat, and the scraps of corned beef, and all the odds and
ends of the waste of the plants, that would be dumped
into old barrels in the cellar and left there. Under the
system of rigid economy which the packers enforced,
there were some jobs that it only paid to do once in a
long time, and among these was the cleaning out of the
waste-barrels. Every spring they did it; and in the
barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale
water -- and cart-load after cart-load of it would be taken
up and dumped into the hoppers with fresh meat, and sent
out to the public's breakfast. Some of it they would
make into "smoked" sausage -- but as the smoking took
time, and was therefore expensive, they would call upon
their chemistry department, and preserve it with borax
and color it with gelatine to make it brown. All of their
sausage came out of the same bowl, but when they came
to wrap it they would stamp some of it "special," and for
this they would charge two cents more a pound.

Such were the new surroundings in which Elzbieta was
placed, and such was the work she was compelled to do.
It was stupefying, brutalizing work; it left her no time
to think, no strength for anything. She was part of the
machine she tended, and every faculty that was not
needed for the machine was doomed to be crushed out of
existence. There was only one mercy about the cruel
grind -- that it gave her the gift of insensibility. Little
by little she sank into a torpor -- she fell silent. She
would meet Jurgis and Ona in the evening, and the three
would walk home together, often without saying a word.
Ona, too, was falling into a habit of silence -- Ona, who
had once gone about singing like a bird. She was sick

[[162]]

p161 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p162w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p163

v?