Jurgis went down the line with the rest of the visitors, staring openmouthed, lost in wonder.  He had dressed hogs himself in the forest of Lithuania; but he had never expected to live to see one hog dressed by several hundred men.  It was like a wonderful poem to him, and he took it all in guilelessly—­even to the conspicuous signs demanding immaculate cleanliness of the employees.  Jurgis was vexed when the cynical Jokubas translated these signs with sarcastic comments, offering to take them to the secret rooms where the spoiled meats went to be doctored.

The party descended to the next floor, where the various waste materials were treated.  Here came the entrails, to be scraped and washed clean for sausage casings; men and women worked here in the midst of a sickening stench, which caused the visitors to hasten by, gasping.  To another room came all the scraps to be “tanked,” which meant boiling and pumping off the grease to make soap and lard; below they took out the refuse, and this, too, was a region in which the visitors did not linger.  In still other places men were engaged in cutting up the carcasses that had been through the chilling rooms.  First there were the “splitters,” the most expert workmen in the plant, who earned as high as fifty cents an hour, and did not a thing all day except chop hogs down the middle.  Then there were “cleaver men,” great giants with muscles of iron; each had two men to attend him—­to slide the half carcass in front of him on the table, and hold it while he chopped it, and then turn each piece so that he might chop it once more.  His cleaver had a blade about two feet long, and he never made but one cut; he made it so neatly, too, that his implement did not smite through and dull itself—­there was just enough force for a perfect cut, and no more.  So through various yawning holes there slipped to the floor below—­to one room hams, to another forequarters, to another sides of pork.  One might go down to this floor and see the pickling rooms, where the hams were put into vats, and the great smoke rooms, with their airtight iron doors.  In other rooms they prepared salt pork—­there were whole cellars full of it, built up in great towers to the ceiling.  In yet other rooms they were putting up meats in boxes and barrels, and wrapping hams and bacon in oiled paper, sealing and labeling and sewing them.  From the doors of these rooms went men with loaded trucks, to the platform where freight cars were waiting to be filled; and one went out there and realized with a start that he had come at last to the ground floor of this enormous building.

Then the party went across the street to where they did the killing of beef—­where every hour they turned four or five hundred cattle into meat.  Unlike the place they had left, all this work was done on one floor; and instead of there being one line of carcasses which moved to the workmen, there were fifteen or twenty lines, and the men moved from one to another of these.  This made a scene of intense activity, a picture of human power wonderful to watch.  It was all in one great room, like a circus amphitheater, with a gallery for visitors running over the center.