Hundreds have praised the rasher of ham, and thousands the flitch of bacon; it took the stroke of but one pen to make roast pig classical.

The pig of to-day is so unlike his distant progenitor that he would not be recognized; if by any chance he were recognized, it would be only with a grunt of scorn for his unwieldy shape and his unenterprising spirit.  Gone are the fleet legs, great head, bulky snout, terrible jaws, warlike tusks, open nostrils, flapping ears, gaunt flanks, and racing sides; and with these has gone everything that told of strength, freedom, and wild life.  In their place has come a cuboidal mass, twice as long as it is broad or high, with a place in front for mouth and eyes, and a foolish-looking leg under each corner.  A mighty fall from “freedom’s lofty heights,” but a wonderfully improved machine.  The modern hog is to his progenitor as the man with the steam-hammer to the man with the stone-hammer,—­infinitely more useful, though not so free.

It is not easy to overestimate the value of swine to the general farmer; but to the factory farmer they are indispensable.  They furnish a profitable market for much that could not be sold, and they turn this waste material into a surprising lot of money in a marvellously short time.  A pig should reach his market before he is nine months old.  From the time he is new-born until he is 250 days old, he should gain at least one pound a day, which means five cents, in ordinary times.  During this time he has eaten, of things which might possibly have been sold, perhaps five dollars’ worth.  At 250 days, with a gain of one pound a day, he is worth, one year with another, $12.50.  This is putting it too low for my market, but it gives a profit of not less than $6 a head after paying freight and commissions.  It is, then, only a question of how many to keep and how to keep them.  To answer the first half of this question I would say, Keep just as many as you can keep well.  It never pays to keep stock on half rations of food or care, and pigs are not exceptions.  In answering the other half of the question, how to keep them, I shall have to go into details of the first building of a piggery at Four Oaks.

As in the case of the hens, I determined to start clean.  Hogs had been kept on the farm for years, and, so far as I could learn, there had been no epizooetic disease.  The swine had had free range most of the time, and the specimens which I bought were healthy and as well grown as could be expected.  They were not what I wanted, either in breed or in development, so they had been disposed of, all but two.  These I now consigned to the tender care of the butcher, and ordered the sty in which they had been kept to be burned.