eparately, and sometimes handled by hundreds of men. Where Jurgis
worked there was a machine which cut and stamped a certain piece of
steel about two square inches in size; the pieces came tumbling out upon
a tray, and all that human hands had to do was to pile them in regular
rows, and change the trays at intervals. This was done by a single boy,
who stood with eyes and thought centered upon it, and fingers flying so
fast that the sounds of the bits of steel striking upon each other was
like the music of an express train as one hears it in a sleeping car at
night. This was "piece-work," of course; and besides it was made certain
that the boy did not idle, by setting the machine to match the highest
possible speed of human hands. Thirty thousand of these pieces he
handled every day, nine or ten million every year--how many in a
lifetime it rested with the gods to say. Near by him men sat bending
over whirling grindstones, putting the finishing touches to the steel
knives of the reaper; picking them out of a basket with the right hand,
pressing first one side and then the other against the stone and finally
dropping them with the left hand into another basket. One of these men
told Jurgis that he had sharpened three thousand pieces of steel a day
for thirteen years. In the next room were wonderful machines that ate
up long steel rods by slow stages, cutting them off, seizing the pieces,
stamping heads upon them, grinding them and polishing them, threading
them, and finally dropping them into a basket, all ready to bolt the
harvesters together. From yet another machine came tens of thousands of
steel burs to fit upon these bolts. In other places all these various
parts were dipped into troughs of paint and hung up to dry, and then
slid along on trolleys to a room where men streaked them with red and
yellow, so that they might look cheerful in the harvest fields.

Jurgis's friend worked upstairs in the casting rooms, and his task was
to make the molds of a certain part. He shoveled black sand into an
iron receptacle and pounded it tight and set it aside to harden; then it
would be taken out, and molten iron poured into it. This man, too, was
paid by the mold--or rather for perfect castings, nearly half his
work going for naught. You might see him, along with dozens of others,
toiling like one possessed by a whole community of demons; his arms
working like the driving rods of an engine, his long, black hair flying
wild, his