Squinty made up his little mind that he was going to be very careful.  Now that he was safely out of the pen again he did not want to be caught the second time.  He did not want Don, or the farmer, to see him, so he crawled along, keeping as much out of sight as he could.

“I wish my brothers, Wuff-Wuff or Squealer were with me,” said Squinty softly to himself, in pig language.  “But if I had awakened them, and asked them to run away with me, mamma or papa might have heard, and stopped us.”

Squinty did not feel at all sorry about running away and leaving his father and mother, and brothers and sisters.  You see he thought he would be back with them again in a few hours, for he did not intend to stay away from the pen longer than that.  But many things can happen in a few hours, as you shall see.

“I won’t eat any pig weed just yet,” thought Squinty, as he went softly on between the rows of potato vines.  “To pull up any of it, and eat it now, would make it wiggle.  Then Don or the farmer might see it wiggling, and run over to find out what it was all about.  Then I’d be caught.  I’ll wait a bit.”

So, though he was very hungry, he would not eat a bit of the pig weed that grew near the pen.  And he never so much as dreamed of taking any of the farmer’s potatoes.  He did not yet know the taste of them.  But, let me tell you, pigs who have eaten potatoes, even the little ones the farmer cannot sell, are very fond of them.  But, so far, Squinty had never eaten even a little potato.

On and on went the little pig, looking back now and then toward the pen to see if any of the other pigs were coming after him.  But none were.

And there was no sign of Don, the barking dog, nor the farmer, either.  There was nothing to stop Squinty from running away.  Soon he was some distance from the pen, and then he thought it would be safe to nibble at a bit of pig weed.  He took a large mouthful from a tall, green plant.

“Oh, how good that tastes!” thought Squinty.  “It is much better and fresher than the kind the farmer throws into the pen to us.”

Perhaps this was true, but I imagine the reason the pig weed tasted so much better was because Squinty was running away.

Perhaps you know how it is yourself.  Did you ever go out the back way, when mamma was washing the dishes, and run over to your aunt’s or your grandma’s house, and get a piece of bread and jam?  If you ever did, you probably thought that bread and jam was much nicer than the kind you could get at home, though really there isn’t any better bread and jam than mother makes.  But, somehow or other, the kind you get away from home tastes differently, doesn’t it?

It was that way with Squinty, the comical pig.  He ate and ate the pig weed, until he had eaten about as much as was good for him.  And then, as he saw one little potato on the ground, where it had rolled out of the hill in which it grew with the others, Squinty ate that.  He did not think the farmer would care.