Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/579

 Rh arms, also besmeared with blood. Their work had been completed half an hour ago, so that day we could only see the empty "chambers." Notwithstanding that these chambers were open on both sides, there was an oppressive smell of warm blood, the floor was brown and shining, with congealed black blood in the cavities.

One of the butchers described the process of slaughtering, and showed us the place where it was done. I did not quite understand him, and formed for myself a wrong, but very horrible, idea of the way the animals are slaughtered; and I fancied that, as is often the case, the reality would very likely produce upon me a weaker impression than the imagination. But in this I was mistaken.

The next time I visited the slaughter-house I went in time. It was the Friday before Trinity. It was a warm day in June. The smell of glue and blood was even stronger and more penetrating than on my first visit. The work was at its height. The dusty yard was full of cattle, and animals had been driven into all the inclosures beside the chambers.

In the street, before the entrance, stood carts to which oxen, calves, and cows were tied. Other carts drawn by good horses and filled with live calves, their heads hanging down and swaying about, drew up and were unloaded; and similar carts containing the carcasses of oxen, with trembling legs sticking out, with heads and bright red lungs and brown livers, drove away from the slaughter-house. By the fence stood the cattle-dealers' horses. The dealers themselves, in their long coats, with their whips and knouts in their hands, were walking about the yard, either marking with tar the cattle belonging to the same owner, or bargaining or else directing the passage of the oxen and bulls from the great yard into the inclosures which led into the chambers. These men were evidently all preoccupied with money dealings and calculations, and any thought as to whether it was right or wrong to kill these animals was as far from their minds as questions about the chemical composition of the blood that covered the floor of the chambers.