more of them were piling in every day.  By and by they would have their revenge, though, for the thing was getting beyond human endurance, and the people would rise and murder the packers.  Grandmother Majauszkiene was a socialist, or some such strange thing; another son of hers was working in the mines of Siberia, and the old lady herself had made speeches in her time—­which made her seem all the more terrible to her present auditors.

They called her back to the story of the house.  The German family had been a good sort.  To be sure there had been a great many of them, which was a common failing in Packingtown; but they had worked hard, and the father had been a steady man, and they had a good deal more than half paid for the house.  But he had been killed in an elevator accident in Durham’s.

Then there had come the Irish, and there had been lots of them, too; the husband drank and beat the children—­the neighbors could hear them shrieking any night.  They were behind with their rent all the time, but the company was good to them; there was some politics back of that, Grandmother Majauszkiene could not say just what, but the Laffertys had belonged to the “War Whoop League,” which was a sort of political club of all the thugs and rowdies in the district; and if you belonged to that, you could never be arrested for anything.  Once upon a time old Lafferty had been caught with a gang that had stolen cows from several of the poor people of the neighborhood and butchered them in an old shanty back of the yards and sold them.  He had been in jail only three days for it, and had come out laughing, and had not even lost his place in the packing house.  He had gone all to ruin with the drink, however, and lost his power; one of his sons, who was a good man, had kept him and the family up for a year or two, but then he had got sick with consumption.

That was another thing, Grandmother Majauszkiene interrupted herself—­this house was unlucky.  Every family that lived in it, some one was sure to get consumption.  Nobody could tell why that was; there must be something about the house, or the way it was built—­some folks said it was because the building had been begun in the dark of the moon.  There were dozens of houses that way in Packingtown.  Sometimes there would be a particular room that you could point out—­if anybody slept in that room he was just as good as dead.  With this house it had been the Irish first; and then a Bohemian family had lost a child of it—­though, to be sure, that was uncertain, since it was hard to tell what was the matter with children who worked in the yards.  In those days there had been no law about the age of children—­the packers had worked all but the babies.  At this remark the family looked puzzled, and Grandmother Majauszkiene again had to make an explanation—­that it was against the law for children to work before they were sixteen.  What was the sense of that? they asked.  They had been thinking of letting little Stanislovas go