enough for use of the ordinary farmer and
cottager. But very soon the useful contagion
spread far and wide. The hog, being a breeding
stock within reach of every one, and an animal
that produces a numerous litter at an early age,
being also so constituted that there are no such
differences of breed or tribe forbidding
intermixture like among cattle and sheep, has, in
seventy years of the application of the Bakewell
breeding principles (see Mutton article), been
more completely revolutionised or reformed than
the superior animals. The pig is found attached
to peasants' cottages and citizens' villas, as well
as on great farms. Any one who can keep a
pig and a sow has, or ought to have, from seven
to fourteen at a litter; twenty is not an
uncommon number. So the change from Bewick's
Portraits to best Yorks, Cumberlands,
Lancashires, Berks, Suffolk, Essex, and Norfolk,
has been rapid and complete. The worst breeds
have become curiosities. Those that remain
have been substantially improved by selection
and by crosses, for there are none of
the difficulties in crossing pigs that exist in
crossing Short-horns and Devons, Leicester and
South Downs. New tribes have been established,
and males of the best sorts are to be found in
parishes blessed with an agricultural squire or
parson; so, instead of the wall-sided, herring-
backed, bristly fellow who used to ask at least
two, and often three, years to grow into bacon,
every cottager can now buy a big, a little, a
middle-sized sort, that at from seven to ten
months old will be a model pig, that is to say,
an oval shaped fellow, and, like an egg, full of
meat, and may be brought to a very eatable size
at twelve weeks.

It is a curious fact that, although every part
of a pig comes into use, although he has less of
fat than any other animal, although he gives not
only hams and flitches of bacon, Bath chops,
pork, fresh and pickled, sausages, black-puddings,
chitterlings, liver, with bacon, and, too much
neglected in England, pied de cochon à la
Sainte Menehould, viz. boiled and then fried in
butter, a delicious breakfast dish, although the
skin and bristles are supposed to be useful, but
this is mythic in England, where the skin goes
for rind or crackling, and bristles are too sparse
and too soft to be of any use, yet, with all
this stock of eatability, it rarely pays to feed
pigs, if much food has to be purchased.
Amateurs, like the late Sir John Conway, have
tried the experiment on a large scale again and
again, but the balance has always been on the
wrong side. The pig is an admirable gleaner,
"a shack" they call him in Norfolk, where the
great Coke introduced, half a century ago, Lord
Western's Neapolitan cross. Will Notes and
Queries tell us why harvest-gleaning pigs, that
pick up the shed beans, and barley, oats, and wheat,
are called shacks? Pigs are the indispensable
attendants of a dairy, especially a cheese dairy,
of a mill, a brewery, or a distillery, wherever
they can be fed with what is nutritious, but not
saleable, up to a turning-point, and then quickly
finished with barley, oats, Indian corn, damaged
rice, and not too much peas or beans, then he is
a good investment, if judiciously sold in the
shape best suited to the market.

All attempts to make good bacon out of
garbage must fail. The Germans were half poisoned
by pig sausage fed on distillery and beetroot
waste. Nothing but good meal and pulse will
produce good pig's flesh, and nothing but milk
and meal good fresh pork. The sweetness of
Yorkshire hams arises from the liberal way in
which the pigs are fed with oatmeal: not merely
from the mode of curing. The famous Spanish
hams owe their flavour to the same source. A
first-rate and cheap pig-finishing receipt is four
pounds of Indian meal to one of beans. In
Southern countries, especially in Spain, hogs
thrive on chesnuts and acorns. But the plan does
does not answer in this colder climate, where the
nuts are not sweet enough, unless the pigs are kept
long enough on meal to drive out the acorn taint.

The objection to the pig as a source of profit
on a farm does not apply to a cottage pig if
judiciously selected of a size not too large or
small, and of a fattening breed. The cottage
pig is the savings bank of the whole family;
not only the bank, but the opera, the play,
the source of thought and fun. He can be
walked in the grassy lanes by a four-year old
urchin while growing, he can be fed by
contributions of waste collected by a boy not old
enough to wheel a barrow, he consumes the
odds and ends of the garden or allotment
ground, he absorbs many a pint of beer and
screw of tobacco, he gives heart to the gleaners,
and a proper object for a little assistance without
degradation from richer neighbours. And
then what endless subject of conversation,
speculation, and amusement for the whole family,
who feed him, scratch him, and cut him up in
prospect for weeks before he gives his last
squeak and final and last black pudding. Heartily
do we agree with Squire Sturt, of Dorsetshire,
that "the grunt of a pig in a cottager's sty is
sweeter than the song of a nightingale."

With an allotment, a good cottage and a pigsty,
with pig of the squire's or the parson's
breed, a cottager at modern wages, helped by a
thrifty wife, may be very comfortable.

Very elaborate designs have been made for
pigsties. If warm, well drained, with plenty of
straw, or heather, or fern, or dead leaves, as the
case may be, the pig will do, if fed regularly,
and not allowed to waste his food; his trough
should be cleared out or covered when he has
fed. Amateurs wash their pigs. If washed,
they must be dried; if not dried, they get
the rheumatism. It won't pay to wash pigs on
a farm: the labour cannot be spared, and a
cottager cannot spare the soap. If they have plenty
of clean bedding, and a stone wall to rub
against, with a walk every day for exercise, they
don't need it; but where time and money can
be spared, the same pig may be washed. He
loves to be dry and clean, although in his walks
he prefers wallowing in the mud. Pigs require,
when closely confined to sties, a little salted
clay, or coal ashes, and superphosphate.