contractor who put up
exactly such houses. They used the very flimsiest and cheapest material;
they built the houses a dozen at a time, and they cared about nothing at
all except the outside shine. The family could take her word as to the
trouble they would have, for she had been through it all--she and her
son had bought their house in exactly the same way. They had fooled the
company, however, for her son was a skilled man, who made as high as a
hundred dollars a month, and as he had had sense enough not to marry,
they had been able to pay for the house.

Grandmother Majauszkiene saw that her friends were puzzled at this
remark; they did not quite see how paying for the house was "fooling the
company." Evidently they were very inexperienced. Cheap as the houses
were, they were sold with the idea that the people who bought them would
not be able to pay for them. When they failed--if it were only by a
single month--they would lose the house and all that they had paid on
it, and then the company would sell it over again. And did they often
get a chance to do that? Dieve! (Grandmother Majauszkiene raised her
hands.) They did it--how often no one could say, but certainly more than
half of the time. They might ask any one who knew anything at all about
Packingtown as to that; she had been living here ever since this house
was built, and she could tell them all about it. And had it ever been
sold before? Susimilkie! Why, since it had been built, no less than four
families that their informant could name had tried to buy it and failed.
She would tell them a little about it.

The first family had been Germans. The families had all been of
different nationalities--there had been a representative of several
races that had displaced each other in the stockyards. Grandmother
Majauszkiene had come to America with her son at a time when so far as
she knew there was only one other Lithuanian family in the district;
the workers had all been Germans then--skilled cattle butchers that the
packers had brought from abroad to start the business. Afterward, as
cheaper labor had come, these Germans had moved away. The next were the
Irish--there had been six or eight years when Packingtown had been a
regular Irish city. There were a few colonies of them still here, enough
to run all the unions and the police force and get all the graft; but
most of those who were working in the packing houses had gone away at
the next drop in wages--after t