Another trait in the character of these animals, was the utter scorn with which they treated all attempts to fatten them.  In fact, the usual consequences of good feeding were almost inverted in their case; and although I might assert that they became leaner in proportion to what they received, yet I must confine myself to truth, by stating candidly that this was not the fact; that there was a certain state of fleshlessness to which they arrived, but from which they neither advanced nor receded by good feeding or bad.  At this point, despite of all human ingenuity, they remained stationary for life, received the bounty afforded them with a greatness of appetite resembling the fortitude of a brave man, which rises in energy according to the magnitude of that which it has to encounter.  The truth is, they were scandalous hypocrites; for with the most prodigious capacity for food, they were spare as philosophers, and fitted evidently more for the chase than the sty; rather to run down a buck or a hare for the larder, than to have a place in it themselves.  If you starved them, they defied you to diminish their flesh; and if you stuffed them like aldermen, they took all they got, but disdained to carry a single ounce more than if you gave them whey thickened with water.  In short, they gloried in maceration and liberty; were good Irish scholars, sometimes acquainted with Latin; and their flesh, after the trouble of separating it from a superfluity of tough skin, was excellent venison so far as it went.

Now Phil Purcel, whom we will introduce more intimately to the reader by and by, was the son of a man who always kept a pig.

His father’s house had a small loft, to which the ascent was by a step-ladder through a door in the inside gable.  The first good thing ever Phil was noticed for he said upon the following occasion.  His father happened to be called upon, one morning before breakfast, by his landlord, who it seems occasionally visited his tenantry to encourage, direct, stimulate, or reprove them, as the case might require.  Phil was a boy then, and sat on the hob in the corner, eyeing the landlord and his father during their conversation.  In the mean time the pig came in, and deliberately began to ascend the ladder with an air of authority that marked him as one in the exercise of an established right.  The landlord was astonished at seeing the animal enter the best room in the house and could not help expressing his surprise to old Purcel: 

“Why, Purcel, is your pig in the habit of treating himself to the comforts of your best room?”

“The pig is it, the crathur?  Why, your haner,” said Purcel, after a little hesitation, “it sometimes goes up of a mornin’ to waken the childhre, particularly when the buckwhist happens to be late.  It doesn’t like to be waitin’; and sure none of us likes to be kept from the male’s mate, your haner, when we want it, no more than it, the crathur!”

“But I wonder your wife permits so filthy an animal to have access to her rooms in this manner.”