"And what will become of all these creatures?" cried
Teta Elzbieta.

"By tonight," Jokubas answered, "they will all be killed
and cut up; and over there on the other side of the pack~
ing-houses are more railroad tracks, where the cars come
to take them away."

There were two hundred and fifty miles of track within
the yards, their guide went on to tell them. They brought
about ten thousand head of cattle every day, and as many
hogs, and half as many sheep -- which meant some eight
or ten million live creatures turned into food every year.
One stood and watched, and little by little caught the drift
of the tide, as it set in the direction of the packing-houses.
There were groups of cattle being driven to the chutes,
which were roadways about fifteen feet wide, raised high
above the pens. In these chutes 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 ex~
plained 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

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