She looked up at me patiently, sweetly inscrutable as she added:—
"You need a pig, Dallas, one pig, I am quite sure; but two pigs are nothing short of the pig business, and that is not what we are living here on Mullein Hill for."
She went in with her peas and left me with my pigs—or perhaps they were her thoughts; leaving thoughts around being a habit of hers.
What did she mean by my needing a pig? She was quite sure I needed one pig. Is it my own peculiar, personal need? That can hardly be, for I am not different from other men. There may be in all men, deep down and unperceived, except by their wives, perhaps, traits and tendencies that call for the keeping of a pig. I think this must be so, for while she has always said we need the cow or the chickens or the parsley, she has never spoken so of the pig, it being referred to invariably as mine, until put into the cellar in a barrel.
The pig as my property, or rather as my peculiar privilege, is utterly unrelated in her mind to salt pork. And she is right about that. No man needs a pig to put in a barrel. Everybody knows that it costs less to buy your pig in the barrel. And there is little that is edifying about a barrel of salt pork. I always try to fill my mind with cheerful thoughts before descending into the dark of the cellar to fish a cold, white lump of the late pig out of the pickle.
Not in the uncertain hope of his becoming pork, but for the certain present joy of his being pork, does a man need a pig. In all his other possessions man is always to be blest. In the pig he has a constant, present reward: because the pig is and there is no question as to what he shall be. He is pork and shall be salt pork, not spirit, to our deep relief.
Instead of spirit the pig is clothed upon with lard, a fatty, opaque, snow-white substance, that boils and grows limpid clear and flames with heat; and while not so volatile and spirit-like as butter, nevertheless it is one of earth's pure essences, perfected, sublimated, not after the soul with suffering, but after the flesh with corn and solid comfort—the most abundant of one's possessions, yet except to the pig the most difficult of all one's goods to bestow.
The pig has no soul. I am not so sure of the flower in the crannied wall, not so sure of the very stones in the wall, so long have they been, so long shall be; but the pig—no one ever plucked up a pig from his sty to say,—
"I hold you here squeal and all, in my hand,
Little pig--but _if_ I could understand
What you are, squeal and all, and all in all"--
No poet or philosopher ever did that. But they have kept pigs. Here is Matthew Arnold writing to his mother about Literature and Dogma and poems and—"The two pigs are grown very large and handsome, and Peter Wood advises us to fatten them and kill our own bacon. We consume a great deal of bacon, and Flu complains that it is dear and not good, so there is much to be said for killing our own; but she does not seem to like the idea."