Of the Chicago stock-yards, a veritable village, laid out with its miniature avenues intersecting its mimic streets and numbered blocks, it is late in the day to speak. But it was very interesting in its way to see the poor doomed swine thoughtlessly grunting along the road, and inquisitively asking their way, as it seemed, of the sheep in Block 9 or of the sulky Texan steer looking out between the palings of Block 7; to watch the cattle, wild-eyed from distress and long journeying, snorting their distrust of their surroundings, and trying at every opportunity to turn away from the terribly straight road that leads to death, into any crossway that seemed likely to result in freedom; to see for the first time the groups of Western herdsmen lounging at the corners, while their unkempt ponies, guarded in most cases by drowsy shepherd-dogs, stood tethered in bunches against the palings. All day long the air is filled with porcine clamour, and some of the pens are scenes of perpetual riot. For the pig does not chant his "nunc dimittis" with any seemliness. His last canticles are frivolous. It is impossible to translate them into any "morituri te salutant," for they are wanting in dignity, and even self-respect. With the cattle it is very different. But few of them were in such good case as to make high spirits possible, and many were wretched objects to look at. Dead calves lay about in the pens, and there was a general air of distress that made the scene abundantly pathetic. But, after all, it does not pay to starve or overdrive cattle, and we may confidently expect therefore, that in Chicago, of all places in the world, they are neither starved nor overdriven systematically.
The English sparrow has multiplied with characteristic industry in Chicago, but further west I lost it. I saw none between Omaha and Salt Lake City. So the sparrow line, I take it, must be drawn for the present somewhere west of Clinton. I do not think it has crossed the Mississippi yet from the east. But it is steadily advancing its frontiers--this aggressive fowl--from both sea-boards, and just as it has pushed itself forward from the Atlantic into Illinois, so from the Pacific it has got already as far as Nevada. The tyranny of the sparrow is the price men pay for civilization. Only savages are exempt. Here in America, they have developed into a multitudinous evil, dispossessing with a high hand the children of the soil, thrusting their Saxon assumption of superiority upon the native feathered flock of grove and garden, and driving them from their birthright. They have no respect for authorities, and entertain no awe even for the Irish aldermen of New York. In Australia it is the same. Imported as a treasure, they have presumed upon the sentiment of exiled Englishmen until they have become a veritable calamity. So they have been publicly proclaimed as "vermin," and a price set upon their heads "per hundred." Indeed, legislatures threaten to stand or fall upon the sparrow question. Here in America, men and women began by putting nesting-boxes for the birds in the trees and at corners of houses; I am much mistaken if before long they do not end by putting up ladders against the trees to help the cats to get up to catch the sparrows.