Sarah, steeling herself for the ordeal; Early Ann, who pretended she did not mind slaughtering; Gus, who had a sentimental fondness for every animal on the place; and Stud, for whom this day was the climax of the hog-raising season, trooped down the hill to the slaughter house, started a fire in the stove, and carried water to fill the great iron kettle just outside the slaughter house door. Stud began whetting his knives on his butcher's steel, making a sound which cut through Sarah's flesh like a blade. He liked to whet knives. And he could not deny it, he liked to slaughter. He had the finest butchering equipment of any farmer on Lake Koshkonong. Sticking, boning, and skinning knives in their rack--the steel blades and brass studs in the rosewood handles gleaming in the lantern light; the biggest butchering kettle in the township; the best pair of hand-wrought gambrels, hung from the finest reel on the strongest hickory axle. Some farmers still carried away the blood in buckets, but Brailsford had built himself a slanting trough. His heavy cleavers with their hickory handles, his meat saws, hog hooks, scrapers, chopping block and sausage machine were the best that money could buy. As always, Sarah felt an agony which she would not show. She could not understand that quality in Stanley which made him enjoy killing,--enjoy going out at night to knock the sparrows out of their nests in the straw to wring the necks of the drowsy, blinded birds. At haying time, too, he was careless of the rabbits and half-grown quail as he drove his mower through the timothy and clover. Sometimes when she lay beside him at night she thought of his God-like power to give life and to take it away. Sarah's job on the farm was to feed, nurse and tenderly raise. She supposed that Stud must kill. And yet it frightened her to think that she and her family were no more secure from death than these animals. When the time came God would take them all as easily and with as little ceremony. "Go get the hogs," Stud shouted to Gus. "And, Early Ann, you start the fire under the kettle." Out of their warm hog house the pigs and sows were driven by the hired man's boots. They were herded across the pig yard, littered with thousands of corn cobs from the tons of corn they had eaten. They went in a complaining, squealing drove past the soul-satisfying mudholes (now frozen) where they had wallowed during the summer. They grunted and clambered over one another as they were shunted into the slaughter house. Early Ann, meanwhile, was starting the great fire of hickory and oak under the black iron kettle mounted on its tripod. The red and yellow flames licked up around the kettle, made a scene in the darkness which might have accompanied an early witchburning on the wind-swept New England shore. Sarah was singing a hymn as she cleaned the sausage machine: "_Sweet the Sabbath morning, Cool and bright returning...._" Then: