smooth as a yearling baby.  Having thus reached the lower end of the table, there are a quantity of hooks fitted to strong wooden arms, which revolve round a stout pillar, and which, in describing the circle, plumb the lower end of the table.  On these piggy is hooked, and the operation of cutting open and cleansing is performed—­at the rate of three a minute—­by operators steeped in blood, and standing in an ocean of the same, despite the eternal buckets of water with which a host of boys keep deluging the floor.  These operations finished, piggy is hung up on hooks to cool, and, when sufficiently so, he is removed thence to the other end of the building, ready for sending to the preparing-houses, whither he and his defunct brethren are convoyed in carts, open at the side, and containing about thirty pigs each.

The whole of this part of the town during porking season is alive with these carts, and we will now follow one, so that we may see how piggy is finally disposed of.  The cart ascends the hill till it comes to a line of buildings with the canal running at the back thereof; a huge and solid block lies ready for the corpse, and at each side appear a pair of brawny arms grasping a long cleaver made scimitar-shape; smaller tables are around, and artists with sharp knives attend thereat.  Piggy is brought in from the cart, and laid on the solid block; one blow of the scimitar-shaped cleaver severs his head, which is thrown aside and sold in the town, chiefly, I believe, to Germans, though of course a Hebrew might purchase if he had a fancy therefor.  The head off, two blows sever him lengthways; the hams, the shoulders, and the rib-pieces fly off at a blow each, and it has been stated that “two hands, in less than thirteen hours, cut up eight hundred and fifty hogs, averaging over two hundred pounds each, two others placing them on the blocks for the purpose.  All these hogs were weighed singly on the scales, in the course of eleven hours.  Another hand trimmed the hams—­seventeen hundred pieces—­as fast as they were separated from the carcasses.  The hogs were thus cut up and disposed of at the rate of more than one to the minute.”  Knifemen then come into play, cutting out the inner fat, and trimming the hams neatly, to send across the way for careful curing; the other parts are put in the pickle-barrels, except the fat, which, after carefully removing all the small pieces of meat that the first hasty cutting may have left, is thrown into a boiling caldron to be melted down into lard.  Barring the time taken up in the transit from the slaughter-house to these cutting-up stores, and the time he hangs to cool, it may be safely asserted, that from the moment piggy gets his first blow till his carcass is curing and his fat boiling into lard, not more than five minutes elapse.

A table of piggy statistics for one year may not be uninteresting to my reader, or, at all events, to an Irish pig-driver:—­