and passed his hand over his eyes, not
from any feeling of compassion, but because the spurted blood was in his
eyes, and he had barely time to stick the next arrival. Then that first
stuck swine dropped, still kicking, into a great vat of boiling water,
and spoke no more words, but wallowed in obedience to some unseen
machinery, and presently came forth at the lower end of the vat and was
heaved on the blades of a blunt paddle-wheel-thing which said, "Hough!
Hough! Hough!" and skelped all the hair off him except what little a
couple of men with knives could remove. Then he was again hitched by the
heels to that said railway and passed down the line of the twelve
men--each man with a knife--leaving with each man a certain amount of
his individuality which was taken away in a wheel-barrow, and when he
reached the last man he was very beautiful to behold, but immensely
unstuffed and limp. Preponderance of individuality was ever a bar to
foreign travel. That pig could have been in no case to visit you in
India had he not parted with some of his most cherished notions.

The dissecting part impressed me not so much as the slaying. They were
so excessively alive, these pigs. And then they were so excessively
dead, and the man in the dripping, clammy, hot passage did not seem to
care, and ere the blood of such an one had ceased to foam on the floor,
such another, and four friends with him, had shrieked and died. But a
pig is only the Unclean animal--forbidden by the Prophet.

I was destined to make rather a queer discovery when I went over to the
cattle-slaughter. All the buildings here were on a much larger scale,
and there was no sound of trouble, but I could smell the salt reek of
blood before I set foot in the place. The cattle did not come directly
through the viaduct as the pigs had done. They debouched into a yard by
the hundred, and they were big red brutes carrying much flesh. In the
centre of that yard stood a red Texan steer with a headstall on his
wicked head. No man controlled him. He was, so to speak, picking his
teeth and whistling in an open byre of his own when the cattle arrived.
As soon as the first one had fearfully quitted the viaduct, this red
devil put his hands in his pockets and slouched across the yard, no man
guiding him. Then he lowed something to the effect that he was the
regularly appointed guide of the establishment and would show them
round. They were country folk, but they knew how to behave;