While the drovers are pausing to wipe their sanguinary and demoniac foreheads, and recover their breath, the ox slowly, and as if in a sort of delirium, raises himself on his legs, and stands looking at the drovers with forlorn vacancy. At this juncture the Market Inspector joins the crowd, and after a brief glance at the various sores and injuries, condemns the ox as diseased—therefore unfit for sale. He is accordingly led off, limping and stumbling to the horse-slaughterer’s in Sharp’s Alley, duly attended by the Inspector, to see that his order of condemnation be carried into effect. They are followed at a little distance by two fellows, whose filthy habiliments show that they have slept amidst horrors, who keep the diseased ox in view with a sort of stealthy, wolfish “eye to business.” The dying ox, with the drover, and the Inspector, having slowly made their way through the usual market difficulties, and (to those who are not used to it) the equally revolting horrors of the outskirts, finally get into Sharp’s Alley, and enter the terrific den of the licensed horse-slaughter-house. It is a large knacker’s yard, furnished with all the usual apparatus for slaughtering diseased or worn-out horses, and plentifully bestrewn with the reeking members and frightful refuse of the morning’s work. But even before the eye,—usually the first and quickest organ in action,—has time to glance round, the sense of smell is not only assailed, but taken by storm, with a most horrible, warm, moist, effluvium, so offensive, and at the same time so peculiar and potent, that it requires no small resolution in any one, not accustomed to it, to remain a minute within its precincts. Three of the corners are completely filled up with a heap of dead horses lying upon their backs, with their hoofs sticking bolt upright; while two other angles in the yard are filled with a mass of bodies and fragments, whose projecting legs and other members serve as stretchers for raw skins,—flayed from their companions, or from themselves, lying all discoloured, yet in all colours, beneath. By this means the skins are stretched out to dry. A few live animals are in the yard. There is one horse—waiting for his turn—as the ox-party come in; his knees are bent, his head is bowed towards the slushy ground, his dripping mane falling over his face, and almost reaching with its lank end to the dark muddled gore in which his fore hoofs are planted. A strange, ghastly, rattling sound, apparently from the adjoining premises, is kept up without intermission; a sort of inconceivably rapid devil’s-tattoo, by way of accompaniment to the hideous scene.