re came the "butcher," to bleed
them; this meant one swift stroke, so swift that you could not see
it--only the flash of the knife; and before you could realize it, the
man had darted on to the next line, and a stream of bright red was
pouring out upon the floor. This floor was half an inch deep with blood,
in spite of the best efforts of men who kept shoveling it through holes;
it must have made the floor slippery, but no one could have guessed this
by watching the men at work.

The carcass hung for a few minutes to bleed; there was no time lost,
however, for there were several hanging in each line, and one was always
ready. It was let down to the ground, and there came the "headsman,"
whose task it was to sever the head, with two or three swift strokes.
Then came the "floorsman," to make the first cut in the skin; and then
another to finish ripping the skin down the center; and then half a
dozen more in swift succession, to finish the skinning. After they were
through, the carcass was again swung up; and while a man with a stick
examined the skin, to make sure that it had not been cut, and another
rolled it up and tumbled it through one of the inevitable holes in the
floor, the beef proceeded on its journey. There were men to cut it, and
men to split it, and men to gut it and scrape it clean inside. There
were some with hose which threw jets of boiling water upon it, and
others who removed the feet and added the final touches. In the end, as
with the hogs, the finished beef was run into the chilling room, to hang
its appointed time.

The visitors were taken there and shown them, all neatly hung in rows,
labeled conspicuously with the tags of the government inspectors--and
some, which had been killed by a special process, marked with the
sign of the kosher rabbi, certifying that it was fit for sale to the
orthodox. And then the visitors were taken to the other parts of the
building, to see what became of each particle of the waste material
that had vanished through the floor; and to the pickling rooms, and the
salting rooms, the canning rooms, and the packing rooms, where choice
meat was prepared for shipping in refrigerator cars, destined to be
eaten in all the four corners of civilization. Afterward they went
outside, wandering about among the mazes of buildings in which was done
the work auxiliary to this great industry. There was scarcely a
thing needed in the business that Durham and Company did not make for
the