de out of some of the tubercular pork
that was condemned as unfit for export. At any rate, an hour after
eating it, the child had begun to cry with pain, and in another hour he
was rolling about on the floor in convulsions. Little Kotrina, who was
all alone with him, ran out screaming for help, and after a while a
doctor came, but not until Kristoforas had howled his last howl. No one
was really sorry about this except poor Elzbieta, who was inconsolable.
Jurgis announced that so far as he was concerned the child would have
to be buried by the city, since they had no money for a funeral; and at
this the poor woman almost went out of her senses, wringing her hands
and screaming with grief and despair. Her child to be buried in a
pauper's grave! And her stepdaughter to stand by and hear it said
without protesting! It was enough to make Ona's father rise up out of
his grave to rebuke her! If it had come to this, they might as well give
up at once, and be buried all of them together! . . . In the end Marija
said that she would help with ten dollars; and Jurgis being still
obdurate, Elzbieta went in tears and begged the money from the
neighbors, and so little Kristoforas had a mass and a hearse with white
plumes on it, and a tiny plot in a graveyard with a wooden cross to mark
the place. The poor mother was not the same for months after that; the
mere sight of the floor where little Kristoforas had crawled about would
make her weep. He had never had a fair chance, poor little fellow, she
would say. He had been handicapped from his birth. If only she had heard
about it in time, so that she might have had that great doctor to cure
him of his lameness! . . . Some time ago, Elzbieta was told, a Chicago
billionaire had paid a fortune to bring a great European surgeon over to
cure his little daughter of the same disease from which Kristoforas had
suffered. And because this surgeon had to have bodies to demonstrate
upon, he announced that he would treat the children of the poor, a piece
of magnanimity over which the papers became quite eloquent. Elzbieta,
alas, did not read the papers, and no one had told her; but perhaps it
was as well, for just then they would not have had the carfare to spare
to go every day to wait upon the surgeon, nor for that matter anybody
with the time to take the child.

All this while that he was seeking for work, there was a dark shadow
hanging over Jurgis; as if a savage beast were lurking somewhere i