LOTH

My father was a boilermaster. We lived hard by the factory and our
windows gave on the factory yard. I saw a good many things there. There
was a workingman, for instance, who had worked in the factory for five
years. He began to have a violent cough and to lose flesh ... I recall
how my father told us about the man at table. His name was Burmeister and
he was threatened with pulmonary consumption if he worked much longer in
the soap factory. The doctor had told him so. But the man had eight
children and, weak and emaciated as he was, he couldn't find other work
anywhere. And so he _had_ to stay In the soap factory and his employer
was quite self-righteous because he kept him. He seemed to himself an
extraordinarily humane person.--One August afternoon--the heat was
frightful--Burmeister dragged himself across the yard with a wheelbarrow
full of lime. I was just looking out of the window when I noticed him
stop, stop again, and finally pitch over headlong on the cobblestones. I
ran up to him--my father came, other workingmen came up, but he could
barely gasp and his month was filled with blood. I helped carry him into
the house. He was a mass of limy rags, reeking with all kinds of
chemicals. Before we had gotten him into the house, he was dead.

HELEN

Ah, that is terrible.

LOTH

Scarcely a week later we pulled his wife out of the river into which the
waste lye of our factory was drained. And, my dear young lady, when one