At home, also, there was more good news; so much of it at once that there was quite a celebration in Aniele’s hall bedroom.  Jonas had been to have an interview with the special policeman to whom Szedvilas had introduced him, and had been taken to see several of the bosses, with the result that one had promised him a job the beginning of the next week.  And then there was Marija Berczynskas, who, fired with jealousy by the success of Jurgis, had set out upon her own responsibility to get a place.  Marija had nothing to take with her save her two brawny arms and the word “job,” laboriously learned; but with these she had marched about Packingtown all day, entering every door where there were signs of activity.  Out of some she had been ordered with curses; but Marija was not afraid of man or devil, and asked every one she saw—­visitors and strangers, or workpeople like herself, and once or twice even high and lofty office personages, who stared at her as if they thought she was crazy.  In the end, however, she had reaped her reward.  In one of the smaller plants she had stumbled upon a room where scores of women and girls were sitting at long tables preparing smoked beef in cans; and wandering through room after room, Marija came at last to the place where the sealed cans were being painted and labeled, and here she had the good fortune to encounter the “forelady.”  Marija did not understand then, as she was destined to understand later, what there was attractive to a “forelady” about the combination of a face full of boundless good nature and the muscles of a dray horse; but the woman had told her to come the next day and she would perhaps give her a chance to learn the trade of painting cans.  The painting of cans being skilled piecework, and paying as much as two dollars a day, Marija burst in upon the family with the yell of a Comanche Indian, and fell to capering about the room so as to frighten the baby almost into convulsions.

Better luck than all this could hardly have been hoped for; there was only one of them left to seek a place.  Jurgis was determined that Teta Elzbieta should stay at home to keep house, and that Ona should help her.  He would not have Ona working—­he was not that sort of a man, he said, and she was not that sort of a woman.  It would be a strange thing if a man like him could not support the family, with the help of the board of Jonas and Marija.  He would not even hear of letting the children go to work—­there were schools here in America for children, Jurgis had heard, to which they could go for nothing.  That the priest would object to these schools was something of which he had as yet no idea, and for the present his mind was made up that the children of Teta Elzbieta should have as fair a chance as any other children.  The oldest of them, little Stanislovas, was but thirteen, and small for his age at that; and while the oldest son of Szedvilas was only twelve, and had worked for over a year at Jones’s, Jurgis would have it that Stanislovas should learn to speak English, and grow up to be a skilled man.