ng these was the
cleaning out of the waste barrels. Every spring they did it; and in
the barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water--and
cartload after cartload of it would be taken up and dumped into the
hoppers with fresh meat, and sent out to the public's breakfast. Some of
it they would make into "smoked" sausage--but as the smoking took
time, and was therefore expensive, they would call upon their chemistry
department, and preserve it with borax and color it with gelatine to
make it brown. All of their sausage came out of the same bowl, but when
they came to wrap it they would stamp some of it "special," and for this
they would charge two cents more a pound.

Such were the new surroundings in which Elzbieta was placed, and such
was the work she was compelled to do. It was stupefying, brutalizing
work; it left her no time to think, no strength for anything. She was
part of the machine she tended, and every faculty that was not needed
for the machine was doomed to be crushed out of existence. There was
only one mercy about the cruel grind--that it gave her the gift of
insensibility. Little by little she sank into a torpor--she fell silent.
She would meet Jurgis and Ona in the evening, and the three would walk
home together, often without saying a word. Ona, too, was falling into a
habit of silence--Ona, who had once gone about singing like a bird. She
was sick and miserable, and often she would barely have strength enough
to drag herself home. And there they would eat what they had to eat, and
afterward, because there was only their misery to talk of, they would
crawl into bed and fall into a stupor and never stir until it was time
to get up again, and dress by candlelight, and go back to the machines.
They were so numbed that they did not even suffer much from hunger, now;
only the children continued to fret when the food ran short.

Yet the soul of Ona was not dead--the souls of none of them were dead,
but only sleeping; and now and then they would waken, and these were
cruel times. The gates of memory would roll open--old joys would stretch
out their arms to them, old hopes and dreams would call to them, and
they would stir beneath the burden that lay upon them, and feel its
forever immeasurable weight. They could not even cry out beneath it; but
anguish would seize them, more dreadful than the agony of death. It was
a thing scarcely to be spoken--a thing never spoken by all the world,
that wi