f
death.

Oh! it was then they shrieked and called on their mothers, and made
promises of amendment, till the tackle-man punted them in their backs
and they slid head down into a brick-floored passage, very like a big
kitchen sink, that was blood-red. There awaited them a red man with
a knife, which he passed jauntily through their throats, and the
full-voiced shriek became a splutter, and then a fall as of heavy
tropical rain, and the red man, who was backed against the passage-wall,
you will understand, stood clear of the wildly kicking hoofs and passed
his hand over his eyes, not from any feeling of compassion, but because
the spurted blood was in his eyes, and he had barely time to stick the
next arrival. Then that first stuck swine dropped, still kicking, into
a great vat of boiling water, and spoke no more words, but wallowed
in obedience to some unseen machinery, and presently came forth at
the lower end of the vat, and was heaved on the blades of a blunt
paddle-wheel, things which said "Hough, hough, hough!" and skelped all
the hair off him, except what little a couple of men with knives could
remove.

Then he was again hitched by the heels to that said railway, and passed
down the line of the twelve men, each man with a knife--losing with each
man a certain amount of his individuality, which was taken away in a
wheel-barrow, and when he reached the last man he was very beautiful
to behold, but excessively unstuffed and limp. Preponderance of
individuality was ever a bar to foreign travel. That pig could have been
in case to visit you in India had he not parted with some of his most
cherished notions.

The dissecting part impressed me not so much as the slaying. They were
so excessively alive, these pigs. And then, they were so excessively
dead, and the man in the dripping, clammy, not passage did not seem to
care, and ere the blood of such a one had ceased to foam on the floor,
such another and four friends with him had shrieked and died. But a pig
is only the unclean animal--the forbidden of the prophet.

VI. THE AMERICAN ARMY

I SHOULD very much like to deliver a dissertation on the American army
and the possibilities of its extension. You see, it is such a beautiful
little army, and the dear people don't quite understand what to do with
it. The theory is that it is an instructional nucleus round which
the militia of the country will rally, and from which they will get a
stiffening in time of dan