We afterwards drove about six miles into the country, through oceans of mud, to see one of the great slaughter and packing-houses. I did not venture out of the carriage, but the proprietor took Mr. Wilkins, Lord Radstock, and papa through every part of the building. In a yard below were a prodigious number of immense oxen, and the first process was to see one of these brought into the inside of the building by means of a windlass; which drew it along 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.