Thus was the happy ending to a woeful voyage. The two families literally
fell upon each other's necks--for it had been years since Jokubas
Szedvilas had met a man from his part of Lithuania. Before half the day
they were lifelong friends. Jokubas understood all the pitfalls of this
new world, and could explain all of its mysteries; he could tell them
the things they ought to have done in the different emergencies--and
what was still more to the point, he could tell them what to do now. He
would take them to poni Aniele, who kept a boardinghouse the other side
of the yards; old Mrs. Jukniene, he explained, had not what one would
call choice accommodations, but they might do for the moment. To this
Teta Elzbieta hastened to respond that nothing could be too cheap to
suit them just then; for they were quite terrified over the sums they
had had to expend. A very few days of practical experience in this land
of high wages had been sufficient to make clear to them the cruel fact
that it was also a land of high prices, and that in it the poor man
was almost as poor as in any other corner of the earth; and so there
vanished in a night all the wonderful dreams of wealth that had been
haunting Jurgis. What had made the discovery all the more painful was
that they were spending, at American prices, money which they had earned
at home rates of wages--and so were really being cheated by the world!
The last two days they had all but starved themselves--it made them
quite sick to pay the prices that the railroad people asked them for
food.

Yet, when they saw the home of the Widow Jukniene they could not but
recoil, even so, in all their journey they had seen nothing so bad as
this. Poni Aniele had a four-room flat in one of that wilderness of
two-story frame tenements that lie "back of the yards." There were four
such flats in each building, and each of the four was a "boardinghouse"
for the occupancy of foreigners--Lithuanians, Poles, Slovaks, or