e. Of the butchers and floorsmen, the beef-boners and
trimmers, and all those who used knives, you could scarcely find a
person who had the use of his thumb; time and time again the base of it
had been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh against which the
man pressed the knife to hold it. The hands of these men would be
criss-crossed with cuts, until you could no longer pretend to count
them or to trace them. They would have no nails,--they had worn them off
pulling hides; their knuckles were swollen so that their fingers spread
out like a fan. There were men who worked in the cooking rooms, in the
midst of steam and sickening odors, by artificial light; in these rooms
the germs of tuberculosis might live for two years, but the supply
was renewed every hour. There were the beef-luggers, who carried
two-hundred-pound quarters into the refrigerator-cars; a fearful kind of
work, that began at four o'clock in the morning, and that wore out the
most powerful men in a few years. There were those who worked in the
chilling rooms, and whose special disease was rheumatism; the time limit
that a man could work in the chilling rooms was said to be five years.
There were the wool-pluckers, whose hands went to pieces even sooner
than the hands of the pickle men; for the pelts of the sheep had to be
painted with acid to loosen the wool, and then the pluckers had to
pull out this wool with their bare hands, till the acid had eaten their
fingers off. There were those who made the tins for the canned meat; and
their hands, too, were a maze of cuts, and each cut represented a chance
for blood poisoning. Some worked at the stamping machines, and it was
very seldom that one could work long there at the pace that was set, and
not give out and forget himself and have a part of his hand chopped off.
There were the "hoisters," as they were called, whose task it was to
press the lever which lifted the dead cattle off the floor. They ran
along upon a rafter, peering down through the damp and the steam; and
as old Durham's architects had not built the killing room for the
convenience of the hoisters, at every few feet they would have to stoop
under a beam, say four feet above the one they ran on; which got them
into the habit of stooping, so that in a few years they would be walking
like chimpanzees. Worst of any, however, were the fertilizer men, and
those who served in the cooking rooms. These people could not be shown
to the visitor,--for