If we visit the abattoir on a cold day we shall see perhaps three thousand beeves hanging up in the cool and airy room, but in warm weather we shall have to take a peep into one of those gigantic refrigerators yonder, each of which holds three hundred cattle. The meat is suspended from hooks over a vast bed of ice which keeps the air at a temperature of thirty-eight degrees. Similar refrigerators have been built recently in the holds of vessels, and with forty tons of ice three hundred beeves have been safely transported to Liverpool and sold in the British markets.
Around the door, as we pass out, is a group of pale, hollow-faced men, delicate women, and sickly children, with hacking coughs. These are the blood-drinkers—people in all stages of consumption, who come hither to catch the warm blood of the cattle, which they drink with the eagerness of hope. Some of them have been coming for many months, and have been benefited by the medicine, but in the case of others it is plainly to be seen that they are making a hopeless struggle against death.
“All is over.”
As soon as the meat has cooled sufficiently it is delivered to the retail butchers of the city and its suburbs, who haul it to their shops or to the markets. All night long, while the great city is asleep, the market wagons creak and rumble through the almost deserted streets, and by four o’clock in the morning the beefsteaks for a million breakfasts, and the roasts and other choice cuts for a million dinners, are temptingly displayed on the white wooden blocks or marble slabs, behind which stand the fat, ruddy-faced, good-natured butchers in white aprons ready to serve all comers. The days before Thanksgiving and Christmas are the occasions when the butchers make their greatest displays, and the markets are then well worth a visit. Beef in halves and quarters, fancifully decked with wreaths and streamers, fat haunches, juicy sirloins with just the right proportion of fat to lean, “porterhouse” steaks garnished with sprigs of parsley, and other tender bits, are set off with as much art and made as attractive as a Broadway shop window in the holiday season.
But we have finished our slice of Christmas roast beef and thus ends our story. We may wonder whether there will always be meat enough to supply all the world; but a moment’s reflection will satisfy us that we need not worry about that. There are in Texas alone nearly five millions of cattle and there are nearly half a million driven to market every year. Only think of it! supposing this number all in one drove marching in single file at the rate of ten miles a day, it would be nearly two months from the time the first steer entered New York until the last one came in sight. They would make a line reaching from Columbus, Ohio, to New York—550 miles long.
GRANNY LUKE’S COURAGE.
BY M. E. W. S.