They would have liked to follow it up, but, alas, they had no time for adventures just then.  The policeman on the corner was beginning to watch them; and so, as usual, they started up the street.  Scarcely had they gone a block, however, before Jonas was heard to give a cry, and began pointing excitedly across the street.  Before they could gather the meaning of his breathless ejaculations he had bounded away, and they saw him enter a shop, over which was a sign:  “J.  Szedvilas, Delicatessen.”  When he came out again it was in company with a very stout gentleman in shirt sleeves and an apron, clasping Jonas by both hands and laughing hilariously.  Then Teta Elzbieta recollected suddenly that Szedvilas had been the name of the mythical friend who had made his fortune in America.  To find that he had been making it in the delicatessen business was an extraordinary piece of good fortune at this juncture; though it was well on in the morning, they had not breakfasted, and the children were beginning to whimper.

Thus was the happy ending to a woeful voyage.  The two families literally fell upon each other’s necks—­for it had been years since Jokubas Szedvilas had met a man from his part of Lithuania.  Before half the day they were lifelong friends.  Jokubas understood all the pitfalls of this new world, and could explain all of its mysteries; he could tell them the things they ought to have done in the different emergencies—­and what was still more to the point, he could tell them what to do now.  He would take them to poni Aniele, who kept a boardinghouse the other side of the yards; old Mrs. Jukniene, he explained, had not what one would call choice accommodations, but they might do for the moment.  To this Teta Elzbieta hastened to respond that nothing could be too cheap to suit them just then; for they were quite terrified over the sums they had had to expend.  A very few days of practical experience in this land of high wages had been sufficient to make clear to them the cruel fact that it was also a land of high prices, and that in it the poor man was almost as poor as in any other corner of the earth; and so there vanished in a night all the wonderful dreams of wealth that had been haunting Jurgis.  What had made the discovery all the more painful was that they were spending, at American prices, money which they had earned at home rates of wages—­and so were really being cheated by the world!  The last two days they had all but starved themselves—­it made them quite sick to pay the prices that the railroad people asked them for food.

Yet, when they saw the home of the Widow Jukniene they could not but recoil, even so, in all their journey they had seen nothing so bad as this.  Poni Aniele had a four-room flat in one of that wilderness of two-story frame tenements that lie “back of the yards.”  There were four such flats in each building, and each of the four was a “boardinghouse” for the occupancy of foreigners—­Lithuanians,