d not be distressed by the sight of
their fellows running about in the fear of death. All they know is that
a man on horseback causes their next-door neighbors to move by means of
a whip. Certain bars and fences are unshipped, and behold! that crowd
have gone up the mouth of a sloping tunnel and return no more.

It is different with the pigs. They shriek back the news of the exodus
to their friends, and a hundred pens skirl responsive.

It was to the pigs I first addressed myself. Selecting a viaduct which
was full of them, as I could hear, though I could not see, I marked a
sombre building whereto it ran, and went there, not unalarmed by stray
cattle who had managed to escape from their proper quarters. A pleasant
smell of brine warned me of what was coming. I entered the factory
and found it full of pork in barrels, and on another story more pork
un-barrelled, and in a huge room the halves of swine, for whose behoof
great lumps of ice were being pitched in at the window. That room was
the mortuary chamber where the pigs lay for a little while in state ere
they began their progress through such passages as kings may sometimes
travel.

Turning a corner, and not noting an overhead arrangement of greased
rail, wheel, and pulley, I ran into the arms of four eviscerated
carcasses, all pure white and of a human aspect, pushed by a man clad in
vehement red. When I leaped aside, the floor was slippery under me. Also
there was a flavor of farm-yard in my nostrils and the shouting of a
multitude in my ears. But there was no joy in that shouting. Twelve men
stood in two lines six a side. Between them and overhead ran the railway
of death that had nearly shunted me through the window. Each man carried
a knife, the sleeves of his shirt were cut off at the elbows, and from
bosom to heel he was blood-red.

Beyond this perspective was a column of steam, and beyond that was
where I worked my awe-struck way, unwilling to touch beam or wall. The
atmosphere was stifling as a night in the rains by reason of the steam
and the crowd. I climbed to the beginning of things and, perched upon a
narrow beam, overlooked very nearly all the pigs ever bred in Wisconsin.
They had just been shot out of the mouth of the viaduct and huddled
together in a large pen. Thence they were flicked persuasively, a few
at a time, into a smaller chamber, and there a man fixed tackle on their
hinder legs, so that they rose in the air, suspended from the railway o