He gazes enraptured upon the dainty porker, and as he looks, the desire to own just such a one grows upon him, and soon it becomes a determination to own that identical one, for never another could equal that.  He looks stealthily around and finds the eyes of all are fixed upon the musician and his bagpipe.  No one notices him, and hailing it as a happy omen, he pounces upon the coveted quadruped, grasps it tightly in his hands, and skedaddles.

The music is ended and the crowd disperses.  The absence of piggy is unnoticed till the red-headed urchin whose playmate it is looks around for the loved companion, of his childish sports, and finds it not.  Great research, amid loud outcries, is made, resulting only in the conviction that the pet of the family is gone, leaving no trace behind.

TOM, with his prize, exultingly hurries homeward, his heart swelling with joy at his luck.  Like a dutiful son, he rushes to the arms of his maternal parent and deposits in her capacious lap the dainty prize.  Visions of a luscious supper float through the mind of the female piperess, as she bestows her motherly benediction upon her thoughtful son, and proceeds to put into execution the well-conned lesson of cooking a sucking pig.

Having accomplished the “First get your pig” part, the rest comes easy; and at night, when the old Piper returns, his olfactories are sainted with an odor that startles him from his generally despondent mood, and awakens his curiosity as to the cause of such an unusual flavor from his usually flavorless abode.  He enters and finds a smiling wife and son, with a smoking pig awaiting his coming.  “What next occurred the Poet tells us in the laconic words

    “The pig was eat.”

There was no necessity for describing the way of eating; the fact was enough.  But alas! there is always a dark side to everything, and this happy family were no exception, The bones were left.  They couldn’t eat them, and they didn’t own a dog; so they picked them clean and threw them away.  But, “Murder will out,” and the tiny bones told their own tale.  The village detective soon coupled the feet of the missing pig with the unusual occurrence of a heap of bones before the door of the musician’s abode, and by a process of reasoning unknown to the detectives of the present day, decided that those bones were a pig’s bones—­a stolen pig’s bones, from the fact that the Piper did not earn enough to indulge in such luxuries as sucking-pigs.  Now who stole the sucking-pig?

Clearly not Madame Piper, for she was too fat and heavy to have any light-fingered proclivities.

Clearly not the Piper himself, for he was playing his bagpipe and could prove an alibi.

There was no one left but TOM.  Circumstances pointed him out:  he loved good eating and hated work, and had been noticed gazing upon the charms of the missing family pet.  It was settled, then.  TOM was the thief, and the offender must be punished.  But how?  Law was too uncertain and expensive, TOM was too poor to pay for the pig, so it was resolved to take the worth of it out of him by beating.  The poet tells us