hutes the
stream of animals was continuous; it was quite uncanny to watch them,
pressing on to their fate, all unsuspicious a very river of death. Our
friends were not poetical, and the sight suggested to them no metaphors
of human destiny; they thought only of the wonderful efficiency of it
all. The chutes into which the hogs went climbed high up--to the very
top of the distant buildings; and Jokubas explained that the hogs went
up by the power of their own legs, and then their weight carried them
back through all the processes necessary to make them into pork.

"They don't waste anything here," said the guide, and then he laughed
and added a witticism, which he was pleased that his unsophisticated
friends should take to be his own: "They use everything about the hog
except the squeal." In front of Brown's General Office building there
grows a tiny plot of grass, and this, you may learn, is the only bit
of green thing in Packingtown; likewise this jest about the hog and his
squeal, the stock in trade of all the guides, is the one gleam of humor
that you will find there.

After they had seen enough of the pens, the party went up the street,
to the mass of buildings which occupy the center of the yards. These
buildings, made of brick and stained with innumerable layers of
Packingtown smoke, were painted all over with advertising signs, from
which the visitor realized suddenly that he had come to the home of many
of the torments of his life. It was here that they made those products
with the wonders of which they pestered him so--by placards that defaced
the landscape when he traveled, and by staring advertisements in the
newspapers and magazines--by silly little jingles that he could not get
out of his mind, and gaudy pictures that lurked for him around every
street corner. Here was where they made Brown's Imperial Hams and
Bacon, Brown's Dressed Beef, Brown's Excelsior Sausages! Here was the
headquarters of Durham's Pure Leaf Lard, of Durham's Breakfast Bacon,
Durham's Canned Beef, Potted Ham, Deviled Chicken, Peerless Fertilizer!

Entering one of the Durham buildings, they found a number of other
visitors waiting; and before long there came a guide, to escort them
through the place. They make a great feature of showing strangers
through the packing plants, for it is a good advertisement. But Ponas
Jokubas whispered maliciously that the visitors did not see any more
than the packers wanted them to. They climbed a long