and the dead pig shot across a trough and through another doorway, and then there was a splash! He had fallen head first into a vat of boiling water. Some unseen machinery passed him along swiftly to the other end of the terrible bath, and there a water-wheel picked him up and flung him out on to a sloping counter. Here another machine seized him, and with one revolution scraped him as bald as a nut. And down the counter he went, losing his head as he slid past a man with a hatchet, and then, presto! he was up again by the heels. In one dreadful handful a man emptied him, and while another squirted him with fresh water, the pig--registering his own weight as he passed the teller's box--shot down the steel bar from which he hung, and whisked round the corner into the ice-house. One long cut of a knife made two sides of pork out of that piebald pig. Two hacks of a hatchet brought away his backbone. And there, in thirty-five seconds from his last grunt--dirty, hot-headed, noisy--the pig was hanging up in two pieces, clean, tranquil, iced! The very rapidity of the whole process robbed it of all its horrors. It even added the ludicrous to it. Here one minute was an opinionated piebald pig making a prodigious fuss about having his hind leg taken hold of, and lo! before he had even made up his mind whether to squeal or only to squeak, he was hanging up in an ice-house, split in two! He had resented the first trifling liberty that was taken with him, and in thirty-five seconds he was ready for the cook! That the whole process is virtually painless is beyond all doubt, for it is only for the first fraction of the thirty-odd seconds that the pig is sentient, and I doubt if even electricity could as suddenly and painlessly extinguish life as the lightning of that unerring poniard, "the dagger of mercy" and the instantaneous plunge into the scalding bath.