were put into vats, and the great smoke-rooms, with their
air-tight iron doors. In other rooms they prepared salt-
pork -- there were whole cellars full of it, built up in great
towers to the ceiling. In yet other rooms they were put~
ting up meat in boxes and barrels, and wrapping hams and
bacon in oiled paper, sealing and labeling and sewing
them. From the doors of these rooms went men with
loaded trucks, to the platform where freight-cars were
waiting to be filled; and one went out there and realized
with a start that he had come at last to the ground floor
of this enormous building.

Then the party went across the street to where they did
the killing of beef -- where every hour they turned four
or five hundred cattle into meat. Unlike the place they
had left, all this work was done on one floor; and instead
of there being one line of carcasses which moved to the
workmen, there were fifteen or twenty lines, and the men
moved from one to another of these. This made a scene
of intense activity, a picture of human power wonderful to
watch. It was all in one great room, like a circus amphi~
theater, with a gallery for visitors running over the center.

Along one side of the room ran a narrow gallery, a few
feet from the floor; into which gallery the cattle were
driven by men with goads which gave them electric shocks.
Once crowded in here, the creatures were prisoned, each
in a separate pen, by gates that shut, leaving them no
room to turn around; and while they stood bellowing and
plunging, over the top of the pen there leaned one of the
"knockers," armed with a sledge-hammer, and watching
for a chance to deal a blow. The room echoed with the
thuds in quick succession, and the stamping and kicking
of the steers. The instant the animal had fallen, the
"knocker" passed on to another; while a second man
raised a lever, and the side of the pen was raised, and the
animal, still kicking and struggling, slid out to the "kill~
ing-bed." Here a man put shackles about one leg, and
pressed another lever, and the body was jerked up into the
air. There were fifteen or twenty such pens, and it was
a matter of only a couple of minutes to knock fifteen or

[[44]]

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v?