After Jurgis secures a job and returns to the delicatessen, Jakubas takes the day off to show the newcomers the city. Describe the sights.

To celebrate, Jokubas takes his new friends on a tour of Packingtown. For Jokubas, “the packers might own the land, but he claimed the landscape.” He takes them down to the yards where there are pens of cattle for as far as the eye can see. Jurgis feels pride in taking part in all of this because he ha just gotten a job and “become a sharer in all this activity, a cog in this marvelous machine.” Teta Elzbieta asks what becomes of all the cattle when they are bought and sold in the stockyards. Jokubas tells her that they are all weighed, loaded on trains, and taken to the slaughterhouses, where they will be killed and cut up for food. Everyone could think “only of the wonderful efficiency of it all.”

The party goes up to Durham’s, one of the meatpacking plants, and begins a tour of the factory. The tours are advertisements for the companies and the multiple products that they sell: “Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard...Durham’s Breakfast Bacon, Durham’s Canned Beef, Potted Ham, Devilled Chicken, Peerless Fertilizer!” They climb a series of stairways and see the chute where hogs come into the factory. The hogs come into a narrow room where men chain their legs, and they are lifted up by a wheel to a trolley. The hogs begin to squeal a sound that is “appalling, perilous to the ear-drums,” and many of the visitors laugh nervously at each other while some of the women have tears in their eyes. On the packing floor, men cut the throats of the hogs and throw them into vats of boiling water. “It was pork-making by machinery, pork-making by applied mathematics.”