I have sometimes passed through a remote village on a Sunday where the obsequies of a pig were to be seen in full view from the road; these were usually places where the church was in an adjoining mother-parish, and of course there are times when, for reasons of health or perhaps more correctly ill-health, it is impossible to defer the ceremony.  As a rule, I should imagine that greater privacy is sought, at any rate so far as the public point of view is concerned.  One remembers the story of the man doing some Sunday carpentering; his wife expostulated with him as a Sabbath breaker; he replied that in driving in the nails he could not help making some noise; “then why,” said she, “don’t you use screws?”

An old Dorset labourer who helped with the removal of the pig-wash, and did other small jobs for successive tenants of mine at a furnished cottage on my land in Hampshire, invariably estimated the social status and resources of each new tenant by the consistency of the wash.  When some rather extravagant occupiers were in possession, he reported them as, “Quite the right sort; their wash is real good, thick stuff.”  The villagers at Aldington did not smoke their bacon, but, as it usually hung in the kitchen not far from the big open hearth, and as the place was often full of fragrant wood smoke, the bacon acquired a pleasant suggestion of the smoked article of the southern counties.  The cottagers rarely complained of the smoky state of their kitchens, consoling themselves with the saying, “’Tis better to be smoke-dried nor starred [starved with the cold] to death.”  Bacon naturally suggests eggs; many of the villagers kept a few fowls which sometimes strayed into my orchards; as a rule, I made no objection, but it was not pleasing, when the apples were over-ripe and dropping from the trees, to notice the destructive marks of their beaks on some extra fine Blenheim oranges.

My wife determined to take over our fowls into her own jurisdiction; hitherto they had been under my bailiff’s care, and he rather resented the change as an implication on his management, until it was explained that she was anxious to undertake the poultry as a hobby.  One of the carter boys was detailed to collect the eggs, as some of the hen-houses were in out-of-the-way corners of the yards and difficult to approach.  My wife thought the middleman was appropriating most of the profit; she was determined to get as directly to the consumer as possible and, among others, she arranged with the head of a large school for a weekly supply of dairy and poultry produce.  All went well for a time until one day the boy, anxious to produce as many eggs as possible, as he received a royalty per dozen for collecting, discovered some nests which my man had set for hatching before he retired from the post.  The boy, not recognizing this important fact, came in greatly pleased with an unusually large quantity, and it so happened that the school received the eggs from this special lot.  Next morning forty eggs appeared at the boys’ breakfast table, and forty boys simultaneously suffered a terrible shock on the discovery of forty incomplete chickens.  The head wrote an aggrieved letter of complaint, and though my wife was by that time able to explain the matter, and regret her own loss too of forty chickens, he removed his custom to a more reliable source.