After they had seen enough of the pens, the party went up the street, to the mass of buildings which occupy the center of the yards.  These buildings, made of brick and stained with innumerable layers of Packingtown smoke, were painted all over with advertising signs, from which the visitor realized suddenly that he had come to the home of many of the torments of his life.  It was here that they made those products with the wonders of which they pestered him so—­by placards that defaced the landscape when he traveled, and by staring advertisements in the newspapers and magazines—­by silly little jingles that he could not get out of his mind, and gaudy pictures that lurked for him around every street corner.  Here was where they made Brown’s Imperial Hams and Bacon, Brown’s Dressed Beef, Brown’s Excelsior Sausages!  Here was the headquarters of Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard, of Durham’s Breakfast Bacon, Durham’s Canned Beef, Potted Ham, Deviled Chicken, Peerless Fertilizer!

Entering one of the Durham buildings, they found a number of other visitors waiting; and before long there came a guide, to escort them through the place.  They make a great feature of showing strangers through the packing plants, for it is a good advertisement.  But Ponas Jokubas whispered maliciously that the visitors did not see any more than the packers wanted them to.  They climbed a long series of stairways outside of the building, to the top of its five or six stories.  Here was the chute, with its river of hogs, all patiently toiling upward; there was a place for them to rest to cool off, and then through another passageway they went into a room from which there is no returning for hogs.

It was a long, narrow room, with a gallery along it for visitors.  At the head there was a great iron wheel, about twenty feet in circumference, with rings here and there along its edge.  Upon both sides of this wheel there was a narrow space, into which came the hogs at the end of their journey; in the midst of them stood a great burly Negro, bare-armed and bare-chested.  He was resting for the moment, for the wheel had stopped while men were cleaning up.  In a minute or two, however, it began slowly to revolve, and then the men upon each side of it sprang to work.  They had chains which they fastened about the leg of the nearest hog, and the other end of the chain they hooked into one of the rings upon the wheel.  So, as the wheel turned, a hog was suddenly jerked off his feet and borne aloft.

At the same instant the car was assailed by a most terrifying shriek; the visitors started in alarm, the women turned pale and shrank back.  The shriek was followed by another, louder and yet more agonizing—­for once started upon that journey, the hog never came back; at the top of the wheel he was shunted off upon a trolley, and went sailing down the room.  And meantime another was swung up, and then another, and another, until there was a double line of them, each