to work.  Well, there was no need to worry, Grandmother Majauszkiene said—­the law made no difference except that it forced people to lie about the ages of their children.  One would like to know what the lawmakers expected them to do; there were families that had no possible means of support except the children, and the law provided them no other way of getting a living.  Very often a man could get no work in Packingtown for months, while a child could go and get a place easily; there was always some new machine, by which the packers could get as much work out of a child as they had been able to get out of a man, and for a third of the pay.

To come back to the house again, it was the woman of the next family that had died.  That was after they had been there nearly four years, and this woman had had twins regularly every year—­and there had been more than you could count when they moved in.  After she died the man would go to work all day and leave them to shift for themselves—­the neighbors would help them now and then, for they would almost freeze to death.  At the end there were three days that they were alone, before it was found out that the father was dead.  He was a “floorsman” at Jones’s, and a wounded steer had broken loose and mashed him against a pillar.  Then the children had been taken away, and the company had sold the house that very same week to a party of emigrants.

So this grim old women went on with her tale of horrors.  How much of it was exaggeration—­who could tell?  It was only too plausible.  There was that about consumption, for instance.  They knew nothing about consumption whatever, except that it made people cough; and for two weeks they had been worrying about a coughing-spell of Antanas.  It seemed to shake him all over, and it never stopped; you could see a red stain wherever he had spit upon the floor.

And yet all these things were as nothing to what came a little later.  They had begun to question the old lady as to why one family had been unable to pay, trying to show her by figures that it ought to have been possible; and Grandmother Majauszkiene had disputed their figures—­“You say twelve dollars a month; but that does not include the interest.”

Then they stared at her.  “Interest!” they cried.

“Interest on the money you still owe,” she answered.

“But we don’t have to pay any interest!” they exclaimed, three or four at once.  “We only have to pay twelve dollars each month.”

And for this she laughed at them.  “You are like all the rest,” she said; “they trick you and eat you alive.  They never sell the houses without interest.  Get your deed, and see.”

Then, with a horrible sinking of the heart, Teta Elzbieta unlocked her bureau and brought out the paper that had already caused them so many agonies.  Now they sat round, scarcely breathing, while the old lady, who could read English, ran over it.  “Yes,” she said, finally, “here it is, of course:  ’With interest thereon monthly, at the rate of seven per cent per annum.’”