ies upon a stump and
turns green when he moves to a leaf. The men and women who worked in
this department were precisely the color of the "fresh country sausage"
they made.

The sausage-room was an interesting place to visit, for two or three
minutes, and provided that you did not look at the people; the machines
were perhaps the most wonderful things in the entire plant. Presumably
sausages were once chopped and stuffed by hand, and if so it would
be interesting to know how many workers had been displaced by these
inventions. On one side of the room were the hoppers, into which men
shoveled loads of meat and wheelbarrows full of spices; in these great
bowls were whirling knives that made two thousand revolutions a minute,
and when the meat was ground fine and adulterated with potato flour,
and well mixed with water, it was forced to the stuffing machines on
the other side of the room. The latter were tended by women; there was
a sort of spout, like the nozzle of a hose, and one of the women would
take a long string of "casing" and put the end over the nozzle and then
work the whole thing on, as one works on the finger of a tight glove.
This string would be twenty or thirty feet long, but the woman would
have it all on in a jiffy; and when she had several on, she would press
a lever, and a stream of sausage meat would be shot out, taking
the casing with it as it came. Thus one might stand and see appear,
miraculously born from the machine, a wriggling snake of sausage of
incredible length. In front was a big pan which caught these creatures,
and two more women who seized them as fast as they appeared and twisted
them into links. This was for the uninitiated the most perplexing work
of all; for all that the woman had to give was a single turn of the
wrist; and in some way she contrived to give it so that instead of an
endless chain of sausages, one after another, there grew under her hands
a bunch of strings, all dangling from a single center. It was quite like
the feat of a prestidigitator--for the woman worked so fast that the eye
could literally not follow her, and there was only a mist of motion,
and tangle after tangle of sausages appearing. In the midst of the mist,
however, the visitor would suddenly notice the tense set face, with
the two wrinkles graven in the forehead, and the ghastly pallor of the
cheeks; and then he would suddenly recollect that it was time he was
going on. The woman did not go on; she stayed