Owing to some press of business, the ox was driven to a neighbouring slaughter-house in the Alley. He was led to the fatal spot, sufficiently indicated, even amidst all the rest of the sanguinary floor, by its frightful condition. They placed him in the usual way; the slaughterman approached with his pole-axe, and swinging it round in a half-jocose and reckless manner, to hide his want of practice and skill, he struck the ox a blow on one side of his head, which only made him sink with a groan on his knees, and sway over on one side. In this attitude he lay groaning, while a torrent of blood gushed out of his mouth. He could not be made to rise again to receive the stroke of death or further torment. They kicked him with the utmost violence in the ribs and on the cheek with their iron-nailed shoes, but to no purpose. They then jumped upon him; he only continued to groan. They wrenched his already-broken tail till they broke it again, higher up, in two places. He strove to rise, but sank down as before. Finally they had recourse to the following torture: they closed his nostrils with wet cloths, held tightly up by both hands, so that no breath could escape, and they then poured a bucketful of dirty slaughter-house water into his mouth and down his throat, till with the madness of suffocation the wretched animal was roused to a momentary struggle for life, and with a violent fling of the head, which scattered all his torturers, and all their apparatus of wet rags and buckets, he rose frantically upon his legs. The same slaughterman now advanced once more with his pole-axe, and dealt a blow, but again missed his mark, striking only the side of the head. A third blow was more deliberately levelled at him, and this the ox, by an instinct of nature, evaded by a side movement as the axe descended. The slaughterman, enraged beyond measure, and yet more so by the jeers of his companions, now repeated his blows in quick succession, not one of which was effective, but only produced a great rising tumour. The elasticity of this tumour which defeated a death-blow, added to the exhaustion of the slaughterman’s strength, caused this scene of barbarous butchery to be protracted to the utmost, and the groaning and writhing ox did not fall prostrate till he had received as many as fifteen blows. What followed cannot be written. It is proper to add that scenes like these, resulting from want of skill in the slaughterman, are by no means so common in Smithfield, as in some other markets—Whitechapel more especially. But they occur occasionally in an equal or less degree, in every market of the metropolis.