f 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
storey more pork unbarrelled, and in a huge room, the halves of swine
for whose use great lumps of ice were being pitched in at the window.
That room was the mortuary chamber where the pigs lie for a little while
in state ere they begin 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, being
pushed by a man clad in vehement red. When I leaped aside, the floor was
slippery under me. There was a flavour of farmyard 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. 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 of death.
Oh! it was then they shrieked and called on their mothers and made
promises of amendment till the tackle-man punted them in their backs,
and they slid head down into a brick-floored passage, very like a big
kitchen sink that was blood-red. There awaited them a red man with a
knife which he passed jauntily through their throats, and the
full-voiced shriek became a sputter, and then a fall as of heavy
tropical rain. The red man who was backed against the passage wall stood
clear of the wildly kicking hoofs