Grandmother Majauszkiene saw that her friends were puzzled at this remark; they did not quite see how paying for the house was “fooling the company.”  Evidently they were very inexperienced.  Cheap as the houses were, they were sold with the idea that the people who bought them would not be able to pay for them.  When they failed—­if it were only by a single month—­they would lose the house and all that they had paid on it, and then the company would sell it over again.  And did they often get a chance to do that?  Dieve! (Grandmother Majauszkiene raised her hands.) They did it—­how often no one could say, but certainly more than half of the time.  They might ask any one who knew anything at all about Packingtown as to that; she had been living here ever since this house was built, and she could tell them all about it.  And had it ever been sold before?  Susimilkie!  Why, since it had been built, no less than four families that their informant could name had tried to buy it and failed.  She would tell them a little about it.

The first family had been Germans.  The families had all been of different nationalities—­there had been a representative of several races that had displaced each other in the stockyards.  Grandmother Majauszkiene had come to America with her son at a time when so far as she knew there was only one other Lithuanian family in the district; the workers had all been Germans then—­skilled cattle butchers that the packers had brought from abroad to start the business.  Afterward, as cheaper labor had come, these Germans had moved away.  The next were the Irish—­there had been six or eight years when Packingtown had been a regular Irish city.  There were a few colonies of them still here, enough to run all the unions and the police force and get all the graft; but most of those who were working in the packing houses had gone away at the next drop in wages—­after the big strike.  The Bohemians had come then, and after them the Poles.  People said that old man Durham himself was responsible for these immigrations; he had sworn that he would fix the people of Packingtown so that they would never again call a strike on him, and so he had sent his agents into every city and village in Europe to spread the tale of the chances of work and high wages at the stockyards.  The people had come in hordes; and old Durham had squeezed them tighter and tighter, speeding them up and grinding them to pieces and sending for new ones.  The Poles, who had come by tens of thousands, had been driven to the wall by the Lithuanians, and now the Lithuanians were giving way to the Slovaks.  Who there was poorer and more miserable than the Slovaks, Grandmother Majauszkiene had no idea, but the packers would find them, never fear.  It was easy to bring them, for wages were really much higher, and it was only when it was too late that the poor people found out that everything else was higher too.  They were like rats in a trap, that was the truth; and