Elzbieta was used to working, but she found this change a hard one, for the reason that she had to stand motionless upon her feet from seven o’clock in the morning till half-past twelve, and again from one till half-past five. For the first few days it seemed to her that she could not stand it⁠—she suffered almost as much as Jurgis had from the fertilizer, and would come out at sundown with her head fairly reeling. Besides this, she was working in one of the dark holes, by electric light, and the dampness, too, was deadly⁠—there were always puddles of water on the floor, and a sickening odor of moist flesh in the room. The people who worked here followed the ancient custom of nature, whereby the ptarmigan is the color of dead leaves in the fall and of snow in the winter, and the chameleon, who is black when he lies upon a stump and turns green when he moves to a leaf. The men and women who worked in this department were precisely the color of the “fresh country sausage” they made.