four o'clock in the morning
The hands of these men would be criss-crossed with cuts , until you could no longer pretend to count them or to trace them . They would have no nails , -- they had worn them off pulling hides ; their knuckles were swollen so that their fingers spread out like a fan . There were men who worked in the cooking rooms , in the midst of steam and sickening odors , by artificial light ; in these rooms the germs of tuberculosis might live for two years , but the supply was renewed every hour . There were the beef-luggers , who carried two-hundred-pound quarters into the refrigerator-cars ; a fearful kind of work , that began at four o'clock in the morning , and that wore out the most powerful men in a few years . There were those who worked in the chilling rooms , and whose special disease was rheumatism ; the time limit that a man could work in the chilling rooms was said to be five years . There were the wool-pluckers , whose hands went to pieces even sooner than the hands of the pickle men ; for the pelts of the sheep had to be painted with acid to loosen the wool , and then the pluckers had to pull out this wool with their bare hands , till the acid had eaten their fingers off . There were those who made the tins for the canned meat ; and their hands , too , were a maze of cuts , and each cut represented a chance for blood poisoning .