And now he died.  Perhaps it was the smoked sausage he had eaten that morning—­which may have been made out of some of the tubercular pork that was condemned as unfit for export.  At any rate, an hour after eating it, the child had begun to cry with pain, and in another hour he was rolling about on the floor in convulsions.  Little Kotrina, who was all alone with him, ran out screaming for help, and after a while a doctor came, but not until Kristoforas had howled his last howl.  No one was really sorry about this except poor Elzbieta, who was inconsolable.  Jurgis announced that so far as he was concerned the child would have to be buried by the city, since they had no money for a funeral; and at this the poor woman almost went out of her senses, wringing her hands and screaming with grief and despair.  Her child to be buried in a pauper’s grave!  And her stepdaughter to stand by and hear it said without protesting!  It was enough to make Ona’s father rise up out of his grave to rebuke her!  If it had come to this, they might as well give up at once, and be buried all of them together! . . .  In the end Marija said that she would help with ten dollars; and Jurgis being still obdurate, Elzbieta went in tears and begged the money from the neighbors, and so little Kristoforas had a mass and a hearse with white plumes on it, and a tiny plot in a graveyard with a wooden cross to mark the place.  The poor mother was not the same for months after that; the mere sight of the floor where little Kristoforas had crawled about would make her weep.  He had never had a fair chance, poor little fellow, she would say.  He had been handicapped from his birth.  If only she had heard about it in time, so that she might have had that great doctor to cure him of his lameness! . . .  Some time ago, Elzbieta was told, a Chicago billionaire had paid a fortune to bring a great European surgeon over to cure his little daughter of the same disease from which Kristoforas had suffered.  And because this surgeon had to have bodies to demonstrate upon, he announced that he would treat the children of the poor, a piece of magnanimity over which the papers became quite eloquent.  Elzbieta, alas, did not read the papers, and no one had told her; but perhaps it was as well, for just then they would not have had the carfare to spare to go every day to wait upon the surgeon, nor for that matter anybody with the time to take the child.

All this while that he was seeking for work, there was a dark shadow hanging over Jurgis; as if a savage beast were lurking somewhere in the pathway of his life, and he knew it, and yet could not help approaching the place.  There are all stages of being out of work in Packingtown, and he faced in dread the prospect of reaching the lowest.  There is a place that waits for the lowest man—­the fertilizer plant!