1 They all had to go, even little Stanislovas, who was ill from overindulgence in sausages and sarsaparilla.
2 The men and women who worked in this department were precisely the color of the "fresh country sausage" they made.
3 Thus one might stand and see appear, miraculously born from the machine, a wriggling snake of sausage of incredible length.
4 Those who were still older, and could reach the tables, marched about munching contentedly at meat bones and bologna sausages.
5 Mother hasn't any work either, because the sausage department is shut down; and she goes and begs at houses with a basket, and people give her food.
6 Presumably sausages were once chopped and stuffed by hand, and if so it would be interesting to know how many workers had been displaced by these inventions.
7 For it was the custom, as they found, whenever meat was so spoiled that it could not be used for anything else, either to can it or else to chop it up into sausage.
8 With one member trimming beef in a cannery, and another working in a sausage factory, the family had a first-hand knowledge of the great majority of Packingtown swindles.
9 All of their sausage came out of the same bowl, but when they came to wrap it they would stamp some of it "special," and for this they would charge two cents more a pound.
10 There was no place for the men to wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the sausage.
11 Here came the entrails, to be scraped and washed clean for sausage casings; men and women worked here in the midst of a sickening stench, which caused the visitors to hasten by, gasping.
12 So one morning they were given a quarter apiece and a roll with a sausage in it, and, with their minds top-heavy with good advice, were sent out to make their way to the city and learn to sell newspapers.
13 This string would be twenty or thirty feet long, but the woman would have it all on in a jiffy; and when she had several on, she would press a lever, and a stream of sausage meat would be shot out, taking the casing with it as it came.
14 This was for the uninitiated the most perplexing work of all; for all that the woman had to give was a single turn of the wrist; and in some way she contrived to give it so that instead of an endless chain of sausages, one after another, there grew under her hands a bunch of strings, all dangling from a single center.