The Jungle (Barnes & Noble Signature Editions)

By Upton Sinclair and C. Michael Hurst

It is the dawn of the twentieth century. Two young Lithuanian immigrants, Jurgis and Ona, hold their wedding celebration in Packingtown, the heart of Chicago’s meat packing district. According to custom, departing guests should give money to help pay for the party and start the newlyweds off in life. But many guests walk out leaving nothing. Ona worries about the couple’s debts, but Jurgis calms her, saying, “I will work harder.”

     Strong and confident, Jurgis begins a job in a meatpacking plant, where he bears the twelve-hour work days, the repellent and dangerous labor conditions, and the pitifully low pay. But when his family is cheated in a housing swindle, when his father is forced to turn over one-third of his pay to the man who hired him, and when a sprained ankle costs Jurgis his job, the American Dream that inspired him veers into nightmare. And worse is yet to come.

     Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle after working undercover in Chicago’s meatpacking district for seven weeks. His aim was to draw America’s attention to the plight of exploited immigrant workers and usher in a new age of socialism. Indeed, the public was horrified, but not by workers’ suffering. Rather, Sinclair’s graphic descriptions of the industry’s filthy conditions and use of diseased animals quickly led to passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Nov 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781435141155

Upton Sinclair

Upton Sinclair (1878-1968) is a celebrated American author best known for his 1906 novel, The Jungle, which exposed to poor working conditions and potential health violations in the meatpacking industry. The novel caused a public uproar which resulted in sweeping changes of the industry and catapulted Sinclair into the limelight. He went on to write nearly 100 books and won the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

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CONTENTS

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF UPTON SINCLAIR

INTRODUCTION

THE JUNGLE

ENDNOTES

BASED ON THE BOOK

FURTHER READING

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF UPTON SINCLAIR

INTRODUCTION

THE JUNGLE ARRIVED ON THE LITERARY SCENE IN 1906 WITH A ROAR. Upton Sinclair’s exposé of the horrendous sanitary conditions of Chicago’s meatpacking industry—his vivid images of workers scraping meat remnants from the traps of filthy drains for reuse, of men falling into vats and being processed into meat for human consumption, and of the regular use of harmful chemical adulterants and diseased meat—transfixed the world even as it turned its stomach. President Theodore Roosevelt sprang into action, ordering two separate investigations to authenticate Sinclair’s account. The denials and attacks of the Beef Trust, a handful of large corporations in collusion with one another, could not overcome the withering force of Sinclair’s indictment. Within months of the book’s publication, Roosevelt signed the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act into law. This trailblazing legislation laid the foundations for the modern Food and Drug Administration (FDA) while granting the federal government broader regulatory powers than it had enjoyed before. Interest in The Jungle did not fade with the passage of this legislation, however. It has been read avidly by generations of readers all over the world for more than a hundred years. In part, this is because the rich welter of themes Sinclair explores—the potential antagonisms between the ideals of capitalism and egalitarianism, the intersection of immigration and labor exploitation, the erosion of the power of unions and debates about workers’ rights, the proper role of government with regard to regulation, and the questions about the extent to which our business practices have poisoned our food and environment—are still problems that we argue about and grapple with today. Sinclair, for his part, was not satisfied with The Jungle, which he had hoped would be the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of wage slavery, and he famously complained that he had aimed for the public’s heart, and by accident hit it in the stomach.¹ What Sinclair meant is that the novel failed to stimulate Socialist reforms for the workingmen of America, to whom he dedicated the novel, but his complaint elicits a valuable cautionary note as well. The Jungle’s relevance extends far beyond its historical political legacy, and to reduce it to the sum of the relatively few pages devoted to documenting the disgusting and dangerous food-handling practices of the meatpacking industry is to diminish the richness and significance of a work whose appeal shows no signs of losing its luster anytime soon.

Upton Sinclair was born in Baltimore in 1878. He had a peripatetic childhood that straddled both class and sectional boundaries. Shuttling back and forth between the lavish homes of his rich relatives on his mother’s side and the poverty of his own home, Sinclair’s early exposure to the stark realities of class difference provoked a lifelong interest in class relations. The relentlessness of his father’s alcoholism also strongly impacted him, and he became a puritanical teetotaler (a sub-theme in The Jungle and the topic of a later book The Wet Parade [1931], which was made into a movie in 1932). Sinclair’s family moved to New York City when he was ten years old, and he eventually attended the City College of New York as an undergraduate and Columbia as a graduate student, supporting himself by writing adventure stories, jokes, and dime and serial novels. Before The Jungle, Sinclair had achieved some recognition, but his meteoric rise into literary fame is bound up with his most famous book and parallels the evolution of his political consciousness. Leonard D. Abbott, a former editor of Sinclair, introduced him to Socialism in 1902, and Sinclair’s interest in the movement rapidly escalated. By 1904, he was writing for the Appeal to Reason, a major Socialist newspaper, when his editors suggested to him that he write a serialized book about the failed strike of the meatpackers in Chicago as a follow-up to an article he had written on the same topic for the Appeal. That book became The Jungle, and Sinclair’s life was never the same. He became an international literary celebrity overnight. He became friends with not only fellow literati, but also, after a later move to California, with some of the biggest stars in Hollywood, such as Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and her husband, Douglas Fairbanks. Sinclair was admired by figures as varied as Winston Churchill and Albert Einstein, and he met or corresponded with multiple presidents, including Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, and Lyndon B. Johnson. Sinclair was also personally active in reform and politics. In 1906, he used the profits from The Jungle to establish a utopian community called Helicon Hall, which unfortunately burned to the ground in less than a year. He also came close to winning the Californian governor’s office in 1934 on the strength of his EPIC (End Poverty in California) program, which some biographers credit with helping to push FDR further left during the Great Depression. Sinclair was, above all, a writer, and he wrote prolifically, creating close to a hundred books and plays throughout his life. Notable works besides The Jungle include King Coal (1917), a novel about the Western Federation of Miners strike; Oil! (1927), which was loosely adapted as the movie There Will Be Blood in 2007; Boston (1928), which centers on the Sacco-Vanzetti trial; and the Pulitzer-Prize winning Dragon’s Teeth (1942), which as part of the Lanny Budd series that Truman reputedly admired, took the rise of Nazi Germany as its topic. Sinclair died in 1968 in a New Jersey nursing home.

As Sinclair wrote The Jungle, he applied the valuable lessons he had learned earlier in his career. During the composition of Manassas (1904), a book about the Civil War that had won him some acclaim, he had learned the value of research, and as a result, he had written his most realistic book to date. Now Sinclair traveled to Chicago to stay for seven weeks; there he met Jane Addams at Hull House, toured the slaughterhouses, interviewed workers and doctors, read tracts and publications that critiqued the packing industry, and covertly absorbed as much information as he could. According to Sinclair, toward the end of his stay, he had gathered plenty of source material, but he began to despair of how to frame it. Then he happened upon a veselija, or Lithuanian wedding feast. Struck with inspiration, Sinclair suddenly knew the story he wanted to tell and the main characters that would populate it.

The opening veselija scene of The Jungle reflects this a-ha moment and introduces us to the main characters, an extended Lithuanian immigrant family. The protagonist, Jurgis Rudkus, is strong as an ox, gentle-hearted, and deeply in love with his bride-to-be, a morally upright young woman named Ona. The veselija symbolizes community, selflessness, and shared sacrifice. The veselija is open to all. Any onlooker can straggle in, as Sinclair presumably did. As he writes in The Jungle, "It was one of the laws of the veselija that no one goes hungry." The commitment to communalism implicit in this stance is mirrored by the book’s description of the acziavimas, a long dance in which the guests form a great ring, locking hands and each man takes turns dancing with the bride for as long as he pleases. Unhurried in the pleasure of dance, each man symbolically claims a shared stake in the rite of marriage and the right to intimacy it confers. This shared largesse, however, entails sharing the burdens as well. Since a veselija costs more than what an average worker can make in a year, each guest is expected to make a cash contribution by dropping money into a hat after dancing with the bride.

Sinclair’s depiction of the veselija dramatizes the ways in which capitalism, with its hyperfocus on individual financial success, is incompatible with community. The veselija may be a compact, but the linkages that bind the members of the community to one another cannot survive the strain of capitalist competition: Since they had come to the new country, all this was changing; it seemed as if there must be some subtle poison in the air that one breathed here—it was affecting all of the young men at once. They would come in crowds and fill themselves with a fine dinner, and then sneak off. This failure to pay—to share the financial strain of the veselija—signals the transformation of the ethic of shared sacrifice into an ethic of selfish individualism. The plight of Jadvyga and Mikolas, young lovers in attendance who have been unable to marry due to the accidents the latter has sustained at his job as a beef boner, further reinforces Sinclair’s argument that capitalism forecloses all intimacy. Sinclair’s depiction of the debilitating effects of financial stress on Jurgis and Ona’s marriage strengthens this argument even more. Exhausted from constant work and financial strain, the two become isolated from one another, as Ona discovers one night when her crying accidentally wakes her husband. Rather than consoling her, Jurgis is tired and cross, and Ona thereafter learns to weep silently because their moods so seldom came together now! It was as if their hopes were buried in separate graves. In the beginning, however, Jurgis reacts to the problems raised by the failed veselija by adopting the values of self-reliance that underpin the American dream. Taking his fate upon his own shoulders, he reassures his worried wife by saying, Leave it to me; leave it to me. I will earn more money—I will work harder.

Having set the scene to deliver a scathing critique of capitalism, Sinclair brings to bear the techniques and mood of literary naturalism to make his case. Naturalism was a turn-of-the-century movement that included such authors as Stephen Crane, Edith Wharton, Frank Norris, and Jack London. An offshoot of realism, naturalism reversed the tenor of romanticism by denying the possibility of agency in a hostile world in which external, environmental forces, be they social or natural, overwhelm and crush the individuals who are subject to them. Much of The Jungle proceeds in this vein. Calamity after calamity strikes the members of the Rudkus family, underscoring their inability to have any say about their ultimate destiny. Living on a pittance, after being swindled in a rent-to-own real estate scam, the family is utterly at the mercy of the packers whose decisions about who gets to work—and how much work he or she gets—are absolute and tethered to profit margins rather than concern for human life. Jurgis learns, to his dismay, that the values of self-reliance cannot function in Packingtown because the horrendous working conditions that breed contagion and the relentless speed at which the workers are forced to do their jobs virtually guarantees the onset of disease or injury. The reach of the packers, moreover, is absolute. They control the political system, where offices are for sale to the highest bidder; the courts; and the lives of the workers in every particular. A series of failed attempts to break free from the packers’ control brings Jurgis to his knees, and he finally realizes that the seemingly bad luck that has plagued his family is actually systematic, organized, premeditated and that he is as literally crippled as any wild animal which has lost its claws, or been torn out of its shell.

What sets Sinclair apart from the naturalists, however, are the various literary styles that he attempts to braid with naturalism. Sinclair is as much a muckraker—Teddy Roosevelt’s derisive term for what we would understand today as an investigative journalist—as a naturalist, and The Jungle is often described (following the insight of June Howard, a well-regarded literary critic of naturalism and Sinclair) as having a documentary-like quality, an effect that is wholly missing from other naturalist writers like London and Crane. Muckraking texts abounded in Sinclair’s day. Some prominent examples include Ida Tarbell’s The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904), Lincoln Steffens’ The Shame of the Cities (1904), David Graham Phillips’ The Treason of the Senate (1906), and Ray Stannard Baker’s Following the Color Line (1908). There had even been an earlier muckraking exposé of the packing industry: The Greatest Trust in the World (1905), written by Charles Edward Russell.

Even more important than Sinclair’s muckraking style is his lingering flirtation with romanticism. Sinclair is express about this, noting that what life means to him is to try to put the content of Shelley into the form of Zola.² We see this romantic content after Jurgis wanders into a Socialist meeting and is absolutely electrified by a speaker, possibly modeled on Eugene V. Debs, a nationally prominent Socialist politician and reformer. The speaker legislates the world, to borrow Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous description, by opening Jurgis’ eyes to the constructed nature of the reality that surrounds him. The result is freedom. He would no longer be the sport of circumstances, he would be a man, with a will and a purpose; he would have something to fight for, something to die for, if need be! The book’s last sentences, "Chicago will be ours Chicago will be ours! CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!," would never be found in a naturalistic novel, and they signal the persistence of romanticism in the text, at least to the extent that one can still make an individual choice to participate in collective resistance to remake one’s environment.

Sinclair’s ending, a blatant piece of Socialist propaganda in which Jurgis almost completely disappears, is often the target of criticism for its formal and aesthetic failings. In part, this is because Sinclair struggled to end the text. In a 1930 letter he frankly acknowledges this difficulty, saying I went crazy at the end of that book and tried to put in everything I knew about the Socialist movement.³ In part, however, it is also due to the prejudices of the modernists and New Critics who heavily influenced canonical notions as to what counts as good literature. But Sinclair rejected what he felt were the elitist, obscurantist pretentions of the modernists. Instead, like Harriet Beecher Stowe, he wrote populist, middlebrow literature that was designed to reach the masses so as to rhetorically convert them to a social cause. In this context, his ending, as well as his decision to temper his naturalism with romanticism—after all, a message of utter hopelessness would be rhetorically impotent—even if flawed, makes a great deal of sense.

To end with a call to arms for Socialism, which in the most general sense, is simply a political theory that espouses the idea that the most just form of economic interrelation is one in which the control over the means of production and the benefits that accrue from such control are shared along collective rather than individual lines, may seem strange to a modern reader. Today such a book would face grievous obstacles, particularly in the United States. But in the Progressive Era, which extended from the 1890s until World War I, such an appeal was less controversial. Although many of those who had favorable reactions to The Jungle, like Teddy Roosevelt, rejected Socialism out of hand, it was not quite as controversial as it is in our current political moment. The Progressive Era, like transcendental New England in the 1840s before it and the countercultural movement of the 1960s after it, was a time when the American zeitgeist was more oriented to reform and new ideas. Theodore Roosevelt was a Progressive and is sometimes referred to as a trust-buster for his willingness to take on large corporations. And while Roosevelt may not have gone as far in his radicalism as Sinclair, the latter was far from alone. In 1912, near the zenith of the Socialist movement, the Socialist Party of America (SPA) candidate Eugene V. Debs won approximately six percent of the popular vote for the presidential election. The movement’s power faded during World War I, partially because of the general Socialist opposition to the war (Sinclair was an exception) and partially because of the conservative mood that overtook the country once the Progressive Era ended. Sinclair increasingly drifted toward the center during the Cold War, supporting both the war in Korea and the war in Vietnam, but for most, if not all, of his life, he remained committed to the ideals of a democratic Socialist movement that would institute reform peacefully, via the electoral process, rather than to a program of revolutionary violence.

While the initial public reception of The Jungle centered around questions of its veracity, until recently, the general literary critical reception has celebrated the book’s great descriptive power while positioning it as an exemplar of naturalistic, muckraking, or proletariat fiction with some formal failings. Newer readings of The Jungle include ecocritical and discursive analyses of the text. Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation (2001) stimulated a resurgence of interest in the purity of the food we eat, and critics like Schlosser and Christopher Phelps have recently made the argument that the meatpacking industry, which eventually left the Chicago area, has reconsolidated its power to such an extent that present-day conditions in the industry resonate with some parts of Sinclair’s description of it a century ago. Whether or not we still live in the Jungle, the enduring appeal of the text makes it clear that The Jungle still lives in us and that the roar that marked its entrance onto the stage of American letters continues to reverberate in the ears and hearts of its readers to this day.

C. Michael Hurst is a doctoral candidate in English literature at the University of Buffalo. His current book-length project critically examines the role of the body in Transcendentalist epistemology.

To the Workingmen of America

CHAPTER I

IT WAS FOUR O’CLOCK WHEN THE CEREMONY WAS OVER AND THE CARRIAGES began to arrive. There had been a crowd following all the way, owing to the exuberance of Marija Berczynskas. The occasion rested heavily upon Marija’s broad shoulders—it was her task to see that all things went in due form, and after the best home traditions; and, flying wildly hither and thither, bowling every one out of the way, and scolding and exhorting all day with her tremendous voice, Marija was too eager to see that others conformed to the proprieties to consider them herself. She had left the church last of all, and, desiring to arrive first at the hall, had issued orders to the coachman to drive faster. When that personage had developed a will of his own in the matter, Marija had flung up the window of the carriage, and leaning out, proceeded to tell him her opinion of him, first in Lithuanian, which he did not understand, and then in Polish, which he did. Having the advantage of her in altitude, the driver had stood his ground and even ventured to attempt to speak; and the result had been a furious altercation, which, continuing all the way down Ashland Avenue, had added a new swarm of urchins to the cortège at each side street for half a mile.

This was unfortunate, for already there was a throng before the door. The music had started up, and half a block away you could hear the dull broom, broom of a ’cello, with the squeaking of two fiddles which vied with each other in intricate and altitudinous gymnastics. Seeing the throng, Marija abandoned precipitately the debate concerning the ancestors of her coachman, and springing from the moving carriage, plunged in and proceeded to clear a way to the hall. Once within, she turned and began to push the other way, roaring, meantime, "Eik! Eik! Uzdaryk-duris! " in tones which made the orchestral uproar sound like fairy music.

Z. Graiczunas, Pasilinksminimams darzas. Vynas. Sznapsas. Wines and Liquors. Union Headquarters—that was the way the signs ran. The reader, who perhaps has never held much converse in the language of far-off Lithuania, will be glad of the explanation that the place was the rear-room of a saloon in that part of Chicago known as back of the yards. This information is definite and suited to the matter of fact; but how pitifully inadequate it would have seemed to one who understood that it was also the supreme hour of ecstasy in the life of one of God’s gentlest creatures, the scene of the wedding-feast and the joy-transfiguration of little Ona Lukoszaite!

She stood in the doorway, shepherded by Cousin Marija, breathless from pushing through the crowd, and in her happiness painful to look upon. There was a light of wonder in her eyes and her lids trembled, and her otherwise wan little face was flushed. She wore a muslin dress, conspicuously white, and a stiff little veil coming to her shoulders. There were five pink paper-roses twisted in the veil, and eleven bright green rose-leaves. There were new white cotton gloves upon her hands, and as she stood staring about her she twisted them together feverishly. It was almost too much for her—you could see the pain of too great emotion in her face, and all the tremor of her form. She was so young—not quite sixteen—and small for her age, a mere child; and she had just been married—and married to Jurgis,¹ of all men, to Jurgis Rudkus, he with the white flower in the buttonhole of his new black suit, he with the mighty shoulders and the giant hands.

Ona was blue-eyed and fair, while Jurgis had great black eyes with beetling brows, and thick black hair that curled in waves about his ears—in short, they were one of those incongruous and impossible married couples with which Mother Nature so often wills to confound all prophets, before and after. Jurgis could take up a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound quarter of beef and carry it into a car without a stagger, or even a thought; and now he stood in a far corner, frightened as a hunted animal, and obliged to moisten his lips with his tongue each time before he could answer the congratulations of his friends.

Gradually there was effected a separation between the spectators and the guests—a separation at least sufficiently complete for working purposes. There was no time during the festivities which ensued when there were not groups of onlookers in the doorways and the corners; and if any one of these onlookers came sufficiently close, or looked sufficiently hungry, a chair was offered him, and he was invited to the feast. It was one of the laws of the veselija that no one goes hungry; and, while a rule made in the forests of Lithuania is hard to apply in the stock-yards district of Chicago, with its quarter of a million inhabitants, still they did their best, and the children who ran in from the street, and even the dogs, went out again happier. A charming informality was one of the characteristics of this celebration. The men wore their hats, or, if they wished, they took them off, and their coats with them; they ate when and where they pleased, and moved as often as they pleased. There were to be speeches and singing, but no one had to listen who did not care to; if he wished, meantime, to speak or sing himself, he was perfectly free. The resulting medley of sound distracted no one, save possibly alone the babies, of which there were present a number equal to the total possessed by all the guests invited. There was no other place for the babies to be, and so part of the preparations for the evening consisted of a collection of cribs and carriages in one corner. In these the babies slept, three or four together, or wakened together, as the case might be. Those who were still older, and could reach the tables, marched about munching contentedly at meat-bones and bologna sausages.

The room is about thirty feet square, with whitewashed walls, bare save for a calendar, a picture of a race-horse, and a family tree in a gilded frame. To the right there is a door from the saloon, with a few loafers in the doorway, and in the corner beyond it a bar, with a presiding genius clad in soiled white, with waxed black mustaches and a carefully oiled curl plastered against one side of his forehead. In the opposite corner are two tables, filling a third of the room and laden with dishes and cold viands, which a few of the hungrier guests are already munching. At the head, where sits the bride, is a snow-white cake, with an Eiffel tower of constructed decoration, with sugar roses and two angels upon it, and a generous sprinkling of pink and green and yellow candies. Beyond opens a door into the kitchen, where there is a glimpse to be had of a range with much steam ascending from it, and many women, old and young, rushing hither and thither. In the corner to the left are the three musicians, upon a little platform, toiling heroically to make some impression upon the hubbub; also the babies, similarly occupied, and an open window whence the populace imbibes the sights and sounds and odors.

Suddenly some of the steam begins to advance, and, peering through it, you discern Aunt Elizabeth, Ona’s step-mother—Teta Elzbieta, as they call her—bearing aloft a great platter of stewed duck. Behind her is Kotrina, making her way cautiously, staggering beneath a similar burden; and half a minute later there appears old Grandmother Majauszkiene, with a big yellow bowl of smoking potatoes, nearly as big as herself. So, bit by bit, the feast takes form—there is a ham and a dish of sauerkraut, boiled rice, macaroni, bologna sausages, great piles of penny buns, bowls of milk, and foaming pitchers of beer. There is also, not six feet from your back, the bar, where you may order all you please and do not have to pay for it. "Eiksz! Graicziau! " screams Marija Berczynskas, and falls to work herself—for there is more upon the stove inside that will be spoiled if it be not eaten.

So, with laughter and shouts and endless badinage² and merriment, the guests take their places. The young men, who for the most part have been huddled near the door, summon their resolution and advance; and the shrinking Jurgis is poked and scolded by the old folks until he consents to seat himself at the right hand of the bride. The two bridesmaids, whose insignia of office are paper wreaths, come next, and after them the rest of the guests, old and young, boys and girls. The spirit of the occasion takes hold of the stately bartender, who condescends to a plate of stewed duck; even the fat policeman—whose duty it will be, later in the evening, to break up the fights—draws up a chair to the foot of the table. And the children shout and the babies yell, and everyone laughs and sings and chatters—while above all the deafening clamor Cousin Marija shouts orders to the musicians.

The musicians—how shall one begin to describe them? All this time they have been there, playing in a mad frenzy—all of this scene must be read, or said, or sung, to music. It is the music which makes it what it is; it is the music which changes the place from the rear-room of a saloon in back of the yards to a fairy place, a wonderland, a little corner of the high mansions of the sky.

The little person who leads this trio is an inspired man. His fiddle is out of tune, and there is no rosin on his bow, but still he is an inspired man—the hands of the muses have been laid upon him. He plays like one possessed by a demon, by a whole horde of demons. You can feel them in the air round about him, capering frenetically; with their invisible feet they set the pace, and the hair of the leader of the orchestra rises on end, and his eyeballs start from their sockets, as he toils to keep up with them.

Tamoszius Kuszleika is his name, and he has taught himself to play the violin by practising all night, after working all day on the killing beds. He is in his shirtsleeves, with a vest figured with faded gold horseshoes, and a pink-striped shirt, suggestive of peppermint candy. A pair of military trousers, light blue with a yellow stripe, serve to give that suggestion of authority proper to the leader of a band. He is only about five feet high, but even so these trousers are about eight inches short of the ground. You wonder where he can have gotten them—or rather you would wonder, if the excitement of being in his presence left you time to think of such things.

For he is an inspired man. Every inch of him is inspired—you might almost say inspired separately. He stamps with his feet, he tosses his head, he sways and swings to and fro; he has a wizened-up little face, irresistibly comical; and, when he executes a turn or a flourish, his brows knit and his lips work and his eyelids wink—the very ends of his necktie bristle out. And every now and then he turns upon his companions, nodding, signalling, beckoning frantically—with every inch of him appealing, imploring, in behalf of the muses and their call.

For they are hardly worthy of Tamoszius, the other two members of the orchestra. The second violin is a Slovak, a tall, gaunt man with black-rimmed spectacles and the mute and patient look of an overdriven mule; he responds to the whip but feebly, and then always falls back into his old rut. The third man is very fat, with a round, red, sentimental nose, and he plays with his eyes turned up to the sky and a look of infinite yearning. He is playing a bass part upon his ’cello, and so the excitement is nothing to him; no matter what happens in the treble, it is his task to saw out one long-drawn and lugubrious note after another, from four o’clock in the afternoon until nearly the same hour next morning, for his third of the total income of one dollar per hour.

Before the feast has been five minutes under way, Tamoszius Kuszleika has risen in his excitement; a minute or two more and you see that he is beginning to edge over toward the tables. His nostrils are dilated and his breath comes fast—his demons are driving him. He nods and shakes his head at his companions, jerking at them with his violin, until at last the long form of the second violinist also rises up. In the end all three of them begin advancing, step by step, upon the banqueters, Valentinavyczia, the ’cellist, bumping along with his instrument between notes. Finally all three are gathered at the foot of the tables, and there Tamoszius mounts upon a stool.

Now he is in his glory, dominating the scene. Some of the people are eating, some are laughing and talking—but you will make a great mistake if you think there is one of them who does not hear him. His notes are never true, and his fiddle buzzes on the low ones and squeaks and scratches on the high; but these things they heed no more than they heed the dirt and noise and squalor about them—it is out of this material that they have to build their lives, with it that they have to utter their souls. And this is their utterance; merry and boisterous, or mournful and wailing, or passionate and rebellious, this music is their music, music of home. It stretches out its arms to them, they have only to give themselves up. Chicago and its saloons and its slums fade away—there are green meadows and sunlit rivers, mighty forests and snow-clad hills. They behold home landscapes and childhood scenes returning; old loves and friendships begin to waken, old joys and griefs to laugh and weep. Some fall back and close their eyes, some beat upon the table. Now and then one leaps up with a cry and calls for this song or that; and then the fire leaps brighter in Tamoszius’ eyes, and he flings up his fiddle and shouts to his companions, and away they go in mad career. The company takes up the choruses, and men and women cry out like all possessed; some leap to their feet and stamp upon the floor, lifting their glasses and pledging each other. Before long it occurs to some one to demand an old wedding-song, which celebrates the beauty of the bride and the joys of love. In the excitement of this masterpiece Tamoszius Kuszleika begins to edge in between the tables, making his way toward the head, where sits the bride. There is not a foot of space between the chairs of the guests, and Tamoszius is so short that he pokes them with his bow whenever he reaches over for the low notes; but still he presses in, and insists relentlessly that his companions must follow. During their progress, needless to say, the sounds of the ’cello are pretty well extinguished; but at last the three are at the head, and Tamoszius takes his station at the right hand of the bride and begins to pour out his soul in melting strains.

Little Ona is too excited to eat. Once in a while she tastes a little something, when Cousin Marija pinches her elbow and reminds her; but, for the most part, she sits gazing with the same fearful eyes of wonder. Teta Elzbieta is all in a flutter, like a humming-bird; her sisters, too, keep running up behind her, whispering, breathless. But Ona seems scarcely to hear them—the music keeps calling, and the far-off look comes back, and she sits with her hands pressed together over her heart. Then the tears begin to come into her eyes; and as she is ashamed to wipe them away, and ashamed to let them run down her cheeks, she turns and shakes her head a little, and then flushes red when she sees that Jurgis is watching her. When in the end Tamoszius Kuszleika has reached her side, and is waving his magic wand above her, Ona’s cheeks are scarlet, and she looks as if she would have to get up and run away.

In this crisis, however, she is saved by Marija Berczynskas, whom the muses suddenly visit. Marija is fond of a song, a song of lovers’ parting; she wishes to hear it, and, as the musicians do not know it, she has risen, and is proceeding to teach them. Marija is short, but powerful in build. She works in a canning factory, and all day long she handles cans of beef that weigh fourteen pounds. She has a broad Slavic face, with prominent red cheeks. When she opens her mouth, it is tragical, but you cannot help thinking of a horse. She wears a blue flannel shirt-waist, which is now rolled up at the sleeves, disclosing her brawny arms; she has a carving-fork in her hand, with which she pounds on the table to mark the time. As she roars her song, in a voice of which it is enough to say that it leaves no portion of the room vacant, the three musicians follow her, laboriously and note by note, but averaging one note behind; thus they toil through stanza after stanza of a love-sick swain’s lamentation:

Sudiev’ kvietkeli, tu brangiausis;

Sudiev’ ir laime, man biednam,

Matau—paskyre teip Aukszcziausis,

Jog vargt ant svieto reik vienam!

When the song is over, it is time for the speech, and old Dede Antanas rises to his feet. Grandfather Anthony, Jurgis’ father, is not more than sixty years of age, but you would think that he was eighty. He has been only six months in America, and the change has not done him good. In his manhood he worked in a cotton-mill, but then a coughing fell upon him, and he had to leave; out in the country the trouble disappeared, but he has been working in the pickle-rooms at Durham’s, and the breathing of the cold,