the wedding feast would, of course, be returned to them;
but the problem was to raise it even temporarily. They had been in the
neighborhood so short a time that they could not get much credit, and
there was no one except Szedvilas from whom they could borrow even a
little. Evening after evening Jurgis and Ona would sit and figure the
expenses, calculating the term of their separation. They could not
possibly manage it decently for less than two hundred dollars, and even
though they were welcome to count in the whole of the earnings of Marija
and Jonas, as a loan, they could not hope to raise this sum in less
than four or five months. So Ona began thinking of seeking employment
herself, saying that if she had even ordinarily good luck, she might be
able to take two months off the time. They were just beginning to adjust
themselves to this necessity, when out of the clear sky there fell a
thunderbolt upon them--a calamity that scattered all their hopes to the
four winds.

About a block away from them there lived another Lithuanian family,
consisting of an elderly widow and one grown son; their name was
Majauszkis, and our friends struck up an acquaintance with them before
long. One evening they came over for a visit, and naturally the first
subject upon which the conversation turned was the neighborhood and its
history; and then Grandmother Majauszkiene, as the old lady was called,
proceeded to recite to them a string of horrors that fairly froze their
blood. She was a wrinkled-up and wizened personage--she must have been
eighty--and as she mumbled the grim story through her toothless gums,
she seemed a very old witch to them. Grandmother Majauszkiene had lived
in the midst of misfortune so long that it had come to be her element,
and she talked about starvation, sickness, and death as other people
might about weddings and holidays.

The thing came gradually. In the first place as to the house they
had bought, it was not new at all, as they had supposed; it was about
fifteen years old, and there was nothing new upon it but the paint,
which was so bad that it needed to be put on new every year or two. The
house was one of a whole row that was built by a company which existed
to make money by swindling poor people. The family had paid fifteen
hundred dollars for it, and it had not cost the builders five hundred,
when it was new. Grandmother Majauszkiene knew that because her son
belonged to a political organization with a