about the ages of their children. One would like to know what the
lawmakers expected them to do; there were families that had no possible
means of support except the children, and the law provided them no
other way of getting a living. Very often a man could get no work in
Packingtown for months, while a child could go and get a place easily;
there was always some new machine, by which the packers could get as
much work out of a child as they had been able to get out of a man, and
for a third of the pay.

To come back to the house again, it was the woman of the next family
that had died. That was after they had been there nearly four years, and
this woman had had twins regularly every year--and there had been more
than you could count when they moved in. After she died the man would
go to work all day and leave them to shift for themselves--the neighbors
would help them now and then, for they would almost freeze to death. At
the end there were three days that they were alone, before it was found
out that the father was dead. He was a "floorsman" at Jones's, and a
wounded steer had broken loose and mashed him against a pillar. Then the
children had been taken away, and the company had sold the house that
very same week to a party of emigrants.

So this grim old women went on with her tale of horrors. How much of it
was exaggeration--who could tell? It was only too plausible. There
was that about consumption, for instance. They knew nothing about
consumption whatever, except that it made people cough; and for two
weeks they had been worrying about a coughing-spell of Antanas. It
seemed to shake him all over, and it never stopped; you could see a red
stain wherever he had spit upon the floor.

And yet all these things were as nothing to what came a little later.