I do not remember that anyone spoke to me directly or, at least, coherently enough so that words lodged in my memory, but someone must have explained the general pattern of activity. The object, it seemed, was to move all this soggy fertilizer from its present imposing site to another small but growing pile located about three hundred yards distant. This we were to accomplish by filling paper cement bags with the manure and carrying it, a bag at a time, to the more distant pile. Needless to say, the bags frequently dissolved or burst at the lower seams. This meant scraping up the stuff with the hands and refilling another paper bag. Needless to say, also, pitchforks and shovels were forbidden at the Farm, as was any potentially dangerous object which could be lifted, swung or hurled. It would have been altogether redundant to explain this rule. I have absolutely no way of knowing how long we labored at this Augean enterprise; my watch had been taken from me, of course, and of the strange dislocation of my normal time-sense I have already spoken. I do remember that floodlights had been turned on long before a raucous alarm sounded, indicating that it was time for supper. My weariness from the unaccustomed toil had carried me past the point of hunger, but I do remember my first meal at the Farm. We had dumplings. You usually think fondly of dumplings as being _in_ or _with_ something. We had just dumplings--cold and not quite cooked through. Impressions of this character have a way of entrenching themselves, perhaps at the cost of more meaningful ones. Conversation at the Farm was monosyllabic and infrequent, so it may merely be that I recall most lucidly those incidents with which some sort of communication was associated. A small man sitting opposite me in the mess hall gloomily indicated the dumpling at which I was picking dubiously. "They'll bind ya," he said with the finality of special and personal knowledge. "Ya don't wanta let yaself get bound here. They've got a--" I don't now recall whether I said something or whether I merely held up my hand. I do know that I had no wish to dwell on the subject. If I had hoped for respite after "supper," it was at that time that I learned not to hope. Back to "The Big Rock Candy Mountain" we went, and under the bleak, iridescent glare of the lights we resumed our labor of no reward. One by one I felt my synapses parting, and one by one, slowly and certainly, the fragile membranes separating the minute from the hour, the Now from the Then, and the epoch out of unmeasured time softened and sloughed away. I was, at last, Number 109 at work on a monstrous manure pile, and I labored with the muscles and nerves of an undifferentiated man. I experienced change.