long by a rope attached to its horns and
passing through a ring on the floor.

The beast, by means of men belabouring it from behind, and this rope
dragging it in front, was brought in and its head drawn down towards the
ring, when a man with a sledge-hammer felled it instantaneously to the
ground; and without a struggle it was turned over on its back by the
side of eight or ten of its predecessors who had just shared the same
fate, and were already undergoing the various processes to which they
had afterwards to be subjected. The first of these was to rip up and
remove the intestines of the poor beast, and it was then skinned and
cut lengthways into two parts, when the still reeking body was hung up
to cool. The immense room was hung with some hundreds of carcases of
these huge animals thus skinned and cleft in two. The process, from the
time the animal leaves the yard alive till the time it is split and hung
up in two pieces, occupied less than a quarter of an hour. At the end of
two days they are dismembered, salted, packed in casks, the best parts
to be shipped to England, and the inferior parts to be eaten by the free
and enlightened citizens of this great continent. The greater number of
these beasts come from Texas, and have splendid horns, sometimes three
feet long.

The next thing they saw was the somewhat similar treatment of the poor
pigs; but these are animals, of which for size there is nothing similar
to be seen in England, excepting, perhaps, at the cattle show. At least,
one which papa saw hanging up weighed 400 lbs., and looked like a young
elephant. In the yard below there was a vast herd of these, 1500 having
arrived by railway the night before; the number killed and cut up daily
averages about 500. It takes a very few minutes only from the time the
pig leaves the pen to its being hung up, preparatory to its being cut up
and salted. They first get a knock on the head like the more noble
beasts already mentioned; they are then stuck, in order to be thoroughly
bled; after this they are plunged headlong into a long trough of boiling
water, in which they lie side by side in a quiescent state, very
different to the one they were in a few minutes before, when they were
quarrelling in a most unmannerly manner in the yard below. From this
trough the one first put in is, by a most ingenious machine, taken up
from underneath, and tossed over into an empty trough, where in less
than a minute he is entirely denu