handled by hundreds of men. Where Jurgis worked there
was a machine which cut and stamped a certain piece of
steel about two square inches in size; the pieces came
tumbling out upon a tray, and all that human hands had
to do was to pile them in regular rows, and change the
trays at intervals. This was done by a single boy, who
stood with eyes and thought centered upon it, and fingers
flying so fast that the sounds of the bits of steel striking
upon each other was like the music of an express train as
one hears it in a sleeping-car at night. This was "piece-
work," of course; and besides it was made certain that
the boy did not idle, by setting the machine to match the
highest possible speed of human hands. Thirty thousand
of these pieces he handled every day, nine or ten mil~
lions every year -- how many in a lifetime it rested with
the gods to say. Near by him men sat bending over whirl~
ing grindstones, putting the finishing touches to the steel
knives of the reaper; picking them out of a basket with
the right hand, pressing first one side and then the other
against the stone and finally dropping them with the left
hand into another basket. One of these men told Jurgis
that he had sharpened three thousand pieces of steel a day
for thirteen years. In the next room were wonderful ma~
chines that ate up long steel rods by slow stages, cutting
them off, seizing the pieces, stamping heads upon them,
grinding them and polishing them, threading them, and
finally dropping them into a basket, all ready to bolt the
harvesters together. From yet another machine came
tens of thousands of steel burs to fit upon these bolts.
In other places all these various parts were dipped into
troughs of paint and hung up to dry, and then slid along
on trolleys to a room where men streaked them with red
and yellow, so that they might look cheerful in the har~
vest-fields.

Jurgis's friend worked upstairs in the casting-rooms,
and his task was to make the molds of a certain part.
He shoveled black sand into an iron receptacle and
pounded it tight and set it aside to harden; then it would
be taken out, and molten iron poured into it. This man,

[[237]]

p236 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p237w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p238

v?