s for a
cold-water plunge. He would go in like a man swimming under water; he
would put his handkerchief over his face, and begin to cough and choke;
and then, if he were still obstinate, he would find his head beginning
to ring, and the veins in his forehead to throb, until finally he would
be assailed by an overpowering blast of ammonia fumes, and would turn
and run for his life, and come out half-dazed.

On top of this were the rooms where they dried the "tankage," the mass
of brown stringy stuff that was left after the waste portions of the
carcasses had had the lard and tallow dried out of them. This dried
material they would then grind to a fine powder, and after they had
mixed it up well with a mysterious but inoffensive brown rock which they
brought in and ground up by the hundreds of carloads for that purpose,
the substance was ready to be put into bags and sent out to the world
as any one of a hundred different brands of standard bone phosphate. And
then the farmer in Maine or California or Texas would buy this, at say
twenty-five dollars a ton, and plant it with his corn; and for several
days after the operation the fields would have a strong odor, and the
farmer and his wagon and the very horses that had hauled it would all
have it too. In Packingtown the fertilizer is pure, instead of being a
flavoring, and instead of a ton or so spread out on several acres under
the open sky, there are hundreds and thousands of tons of it in one
building, heaped here and there in haystack piles, covering the floor
several inches deep, and filling the air with a choking dust that
becomes a blinding sandstorm when the wind stirs.

It was to this building that Jurgis came daily, as if dragged by an
unseen hand. The month of May was an exceptionally cool one, and
his secret prayers were granted; but early in June there came a
record-breaking hot spell, and after that there were men wanted in the
fertilizer mill.

The boss of the grinding room had come to know Jurgis by this time, and
had marked him for a likely man; and so when he came to the door about
two o'clock this breathless hot day, he felt a sudden spasm of pain
shoot through him--the boss beckoned to him! In ten minutes more Jurgis
had pulled off his coat and overshirt, and set his teeth together and
gone to work. Here was one more difficulty for him to meet and conquer!

His labor took him about one minute to learn. Before him was one of
the vents of the mill in