Part 7

No. V

KEEPING COWS--(continued.)

129. I have now, in the conclusion of this article, to speak of the manner of harvesting and preserving the Swedes; of the place to keep the cow in; of the manure for the land; and of the quantity of labour that the cultivation of the land and the harvesting of the crop will require.

130. Harvesting and preserving the Swedes. When they are ready to take up, the tops must be cut off, if not cut off before, and also the roots; but neither tops nor roots should be cut off very close. You will have room for ten bushels of the bulbs in the house, or shed. Put the rest into ten-bushel heaps. Make the heap upon the ground in a round form, and let it rise up to a point. Lay over it a little litter, straw, or dead grass, about three inches thick, and then earth upon that about six inches thick. Then cut a thin round green turf, about eighteen inches over, and put it upon the crown of the heap to prevent the earth from being washed off. Thus these heaps will remain till wanted for use. When given to the cow, it will be best to wash the Swedes and cut each into two or three pieces with a spade or some other tool. You can take in ten bushels at a time. If you find them sprouting in the spring, open the remaining heaps, and expose them to the sun and wind; and cover them again slightly with straw or litter of some sort.

131. As to the place to keep the cow in, much will depend upon situation and circumstances. I am always supposing that the cottage is a real cottage, and not a house in a town or village street; though, wherever there is the quarter of an acre of ground, the cow may be kept. Let me, however, suppose that which will generally happen; namely, that the cottage stands by the side of a road, or lane, and amongst fields and woods, if not on the side of a common. To pretend to tell a country labourer how to build a shed for a cow, how to stick it up against the end of his house, or to make it an independent erection; or to dwell on the materials, where poles, rods, wattles, rushes, furze, heath, and cooper-chips, are all to be gotten by him for nothing or next to nothing, would be useless; because a man who, thus situated, can be at any loss for a shed for his cow, is not only unfit to keep a cow, but unfit to keep a cat. The warmer the shed is the better it is. The floor should slope, but not too much. There are stones, of some sort or other, every-where, and about six wheel-barrow-fulls will pave the shed, a thing to be by no means neglected. A broad trough, or box, fixed up at the head of the cow, is the thing to give her food in; and she should be fed three times a day, at least; always at day-light and at sun-set. It is not absolutely necessary that a cow ever quit her shed, except just at calving time, or when taken to the bull. In the former case the time is, nine times out of ten, known to within forty-eight hours. Any enclosed field or place will do for her during a day or two; and for such purpose, if there be not room at home, no man will refuse place for her in a fallow field. It will, however, be good, where there is no common to turn her out upon, to have her led by a string, two or three times a week, which may be done by a child only five years old, to graze, or pick, along the sides of roads and lanes. Where there is a common, she will, of course, be turned out in the day time, except in very wet or severe weather; and in a case like this, a smaller quantity of ground will suffice for the keeping of her. According to the present practice, a miserable "tallet" of bad hay is, in such cases, the winter provision for the cow. It can scarcely be called food; and the consequence is, the cow is both dry and lousy nearly half the year; instead of being dry only about fifteen days before calving, and being sleek and lusty at the end of the winter, to which a warm lodging greatly contributes. For, observe, if you keep a cow, any time between September and June, out in a field or yard, to endure the chances of the weather, she will not, though she have food precisely the same in quantity and quality, yield above two-thirds as much as if she were lodged in house; and in wet weather she will not yield half so much. It is not so much the cold as the wet that is injurious to all our stock in England.

132. The Manure. At the beginning this must be provided by collections made on the road; by the results of the residence in a cottage. Let any man clean out every place about his dwelling; rake and scrape and sweep all into a heap; and he will find that he has a great deal. Earth of almost any sort that has long lain on the surface, and has been trodden on, is a species of manure. Every act that tends to neatness round a dwelling, tends to the creating of a mass of manure. And I have very seldom seen a cottage, with a plat of ground of a quarter of an acre belonging to it, round about which I could not have collected a very large heap of manure. Every thing of animal or vegetable substance that comes into a house, must go out of it again, in one shape or another. The very emptying of vessels of various kinds, on a heap of common earth, makes it a heap of the best of manure. Thus goes on the work of reproduction; and thus is verified the words of the Scripture, "Flesh is grass, and there is nothing new under the sun." Thus far as to the outset. When you have got the cow, there is no more care about manure; for, and especially if you have a pig also, you must have enough annually for an acre of ground. And let it be observed, that, after a time, it will be unnecessary, and would be injurious, to manure for every crop; for that would produce more stalk and green than substantial part; as it is well known, that wheat plants, standing in ground too full of manure, will yield very thick and long straws, but grains of little or no substance. You ought to depend more on the spade and the hoe than on the dung-heap. Nevertheless, the greatest care should be taken to preserve the manure; because you will want straw, unless you be by the side of a common which gives you rushes, grassy furze, or fern; and to get straw you must give a part of your dung from the cow-stall and pig-sty. The best way to preserve manure, is to have a pit of sufficient dimensions close behind the cow-shed and pig-sty, for the run from these to go into, and from which all runs of rain water should be kept. Into this pit would go the emptying of the shed and of the sty, and the produce of all sweepings and cleanings round the house; and thus a large mass of manure would soon grow together. Much too large a quantity for a quarter of an acre of ground. One good load of wheat or rye straw is all that you would want for the winter, and half of one for the summer; and you would have more than enough dung to exchange against this straw.

133. Now, as to the quantity of labour that the cultivation of the land will demand in a year. We will suppose the whole to have five complete diggings, and say nothing about the little matters of sowing and planting and hoeing and harvesting, all which are a mere trifle. We are supposing the owner to be an able labouring man; and such a man will dig 12 rods of ground in a day. Here are 200 rods to be digged, and here are little less than 17 days of work at 12 hours in the day; or 200 hours' work, to be done in the course of the long days of spring and summer, while it is light long before six in the morning, and long after six at night. What is it, then? Is it not better than time spent in the ale-house, or in creeping about after a miserable hare? Frequently, and most frequently, there will be a boy, if not two, big enough to help. And (I only give this as a hint) I saw, on the 7th of November last (1822,) a very pretty woman, in the village of Hannington, in Wiltshire, digging a piece of ground and planting it with Early Cabbages, which she did as handily and as neatly as any gardener that ever I saw. The ground was wet, and therefore, to avoid treading the digged ground in that state, she had her line extended, and put in the rows as she advanced in her digging, standing in the trench while she performed the act of planting, which she did with great nimbleness and precision. Nothing could be more skilfully or beautifully done. Her clothes were neat, clean, and tight about her. She had turned her handkerchief down from her neck, which, with the glow that the work had brought into her cheeks, formed an object which I do not say would have made me actually stop my chaise, had it not been for the occupation in which she was engaged; but, all taken together, the temptation was too strong to be resisted. But there is the Sunday; and I know of no law, human or divine, that forbids a labouring man to dig or plant his garden on Sunday, if the good of his family demand it; and if he cannot, without injury to that family, find other time to do it in. Shepherds, carters, pigfeeders, drovers, coachmen, cooks, footmen, printers, and numerous others, work on the Sundays. Theirs are deemed by the law works of necessity. Harvesting and haymaking are allowed to be carried on on the Sunday, in certain cases; when they are always carried on by provident farmers. And I should be glad to know the case which is more a case of necessity than that now under our view. In fact, the labouring people do work on the Sunday morning in particular, all over the country, at something or other, or they are engaged in pursuits a good deal less religious than that of digging and planting. So that, as to the 200 hours, they are easily found, without the loss of any of the time required for constant daily labour.

134. And what a produce is that of a cow! I suppose only an average of 5 quarts of milk a day. If made into butter, it will be equal every week to two days of the man's wages, besides the value of the skim milk: and this can hardly be of less value than another day's wages. What a thing, then, is this cow, if she earn half as much as the man! I am greatly under-rating her produce; but I wish to put all the advantages at the lowest. To be sure, there is work for the wife, or daughter, to milk and make butter. But the former is done at the two ends of the day, and the latter only about once in the week. And, whatever these may subtract from the labours of the field, which all country women ought to be engaged in whenever they conveniently can; whatever the cares created by the cow may subtract from these, is amply compensated for by the education that these cares will give to the children. They will all learn to milk, and the girls to make butter. And which is a thing of the very first importance, they will all learn, from their infancy, to set a just value upon dumb animals, and will grow up in the habit of treating them with gentleness and feeding them with care. To those who have not been brought up in the midst of rural affairs, it is hardly possible to give an adequate idea of the importance of this part of education. I should be very loth to intrust the care of my horses, cattle, sheep, or pigs, to any one whose father never had cow or pig of his own. It is a general complaint, that servants, and especially farm-servants, are not so good as they used to be. How should they? They were formerly the sons and daughters of small farmers; they are now the progeny of miserable property-less labourers. They have never seen an animal in which they had any interest. They are careless by habit. This monstrous evil has arisen from causes which I have a thousand times described; and which causes must now be speedily removed; or, they will produce a dissolution of society, and give us a beginning afresh.

135. The circumstances vary so much, that it is impossible to lay down precise rules suited to all cases. The cottage may be on the side of a forest or common; it may be on the side of a lane or of a great road, distant from town or village; it may be on the skirts of one of these latter: and then, again, the family may be few or great in number, the children small or big, according to all which circumstances, the extent and application of the cow-food, and also the application of the produce, will naturally be regulated. Under some circumstances, half the above crop may be enough; especially where good commons are at hand. Sometimes it may be the best way to sell the calf as soon as calved; at others, to fat it; and, at others, if you cannot sell it, which sometimes happens, to knock it on the head as soon as calved; for, where there is a family of small children, the price of a calf of two months old cannot be equal to the half of the value of the two months' milk. It is pure weakness to call it "a pity." It is a much greater pity to see hungry children crying for the milk that a calf is sucking to no useful purpose; and as to the cow and the calf, the one must lose her young, and the other its life, after all; and the respite only makes an addition to the sufferings of both.

136. As to the pretended unwholesomeness of milk in certain cases; as to its not being adapted to some constitutions, I do not believe one word of the matter. When we talk of the fruits, indeed, which were formerly the chief food of a great part of mankind, we should recollect, that those fruits grew in countries that had a sun to ripen the fruits, and to put nutritious matter into them. But as to milk, England yields to no country upon the face of the earth. Neat cattle will touch nothing that is not wholesome in its nature; nothing that is not wholly innoxious. Out of a pail that has ever had grease in it, they will not drink a drop, though they be raging with thirst. Their very breath is fragrance. And how, then, is it possible, that unwholesomeness should distil from the udder of a cow? The milk varies, indeed, in its quality and taste according to the variations in the nature of the food; but no food will a cow touch that is any way hostile to health. Feed young puppies upon milk from the cow, and they will never die with that ravaging disease called "the distemper." In short, to suppose that milk contains any thing essentially unwholesome is monstrous. When, indeed, the appetite becomes vitiated: when the organs have been long accustomed to food of a more stimulating nature; when it has been resolved to eat ragouts at dinner, and drink wine, and to swallow "a devil," and a glass of strong grog at night; then milk for breakfast may be "heavy" and disgusting, and the feeder may stand in need of tea or laudanum, which differ only as to degrees of strength. But, and I speak from the most ample experience, milk is not "heavy," and much less is it unwholesome, when he who uses it rises early, never swallows strong drink, and never stuffs himself with flesh of any kind. Many and many a day I scarcely taste of meat, and then chiefly at breakfast, and that, too, at an early hour. Milk is the natural food of young people; if it be too rich, skim it again and again till it be not too rich. This is an evil easily cured. If you have now to begin with a family of children, they may not like it at first. But persevere; and the parent who does not do this, having the means in his hands, shamefully neglects his duty. A son who prefers a "devil" and a glass of grog to a hunch of bread and a bowl of cold milk, I regard as a pest; and for this pest the father has to thank himself.

137. Before I dismiss this article, let me offer an observation or two to those persons who live in the vicinity of towns, or in towns, and who, though they have large gardens, have "no land to keep a cow," a circumstance which they "exceedingly regret." I have, I dare say, witnessed this case at least a thousand times. Now, how much garden ground does it require to supply even a large family with garden vegetables? The market gardeners round the metropolis of this wen-headed country; round this Wen of all wens; round this prodigious and monstrous collection of human beings; these market gardeners have about three hundred thousand families to supply with vegetables, and these they supply well too, and with summer fruits into the bargain. Now, if it demanded ten rods to a family, the whole would demand, all but a fraction, nineteen thousand acres of garden ground. We have only to cast our eyes over what there is to know that there is not a fourth of that quantity. A square mile contains, leaving out parts of a hundred, 700 acres of land; and 19,000 acres occupy more than twenty-two square miles. Are there twenty-two square miles covered with the Wen's market gardens? The very question is absurd. The whole of the market gardens from Brompton to Hammersmith, extending to Battersea Rise on the one side, and to the Bayswater road on the other side, and leaving out loads, lanes, nurseries; pastures, corn-fields, and pleasure-grounds, do not, in my opinion, cover one square mile. To the north and south of the Wen there is very little in the way of market garden; and if, on both sides of the Thames, to the eastward of the Wen, there be three square miles actually covered with market gardens, that is the full extent. How, then, could the Wen be supplied, if it required ten rods to each family? To be sure, potatoes, carrots, and turnips, and especially the first of these, are brought, for the use of the Wen, from a great distance, in many cases. But, so they are for the use of the persons I am speaking of; for a gentleman thinks no more of raising a large quantity of these things in his garden, than he thinks of raising wheat there. How is it, then, that it requires half an acre, or eighty rods, in a private garden to supply a family, while these market gardeners supply all these families (and so amply too) from ten, or more likely, five rods of ground to a family? I have shown, in the last Number, that nearly fifteen tons of vegetables can be raised in a year upon forty rods of ground; that is to say, ten loads for a wagon and four good horses. And is not a fourth, or even an eighth, part of this weight, sufficient to go down the throats of a family in a year? Nay, allow that only a ton goes to a family in a year, it is more than six pound weight a day; and what sort of a family must that be that really swallows six pounds weight a day? and this a market gardener will raise for them upon less than three rods of ground; for he will raise, in the course of the year, even more than fifteen tons upon forty rods of ground. What is it, then, that they do with the eighty rods of ground in a private garden? Why, in the first place, they have one crop where they ought to have three. Then they do not half till the ground. Then they grow things that are not wanted. Plant cabbages and other things, let them stand till they be good for nothing, and then wheel them to the rubbish heap. Raise as many radishes, lettuces, and as much endive, and as many kidney-beans, as would serve for ten families; and finally throw nine-tenths of them away. I once saw not less than three rods of ground, in a garden of this sort, with lettuces all bearing seed. Seed enough for half a county. They cut a cabbage here and a cabbage there, and so let the whole of the piece of ground remain undug, till the last cabbage be cut. But, after all, the produce, even in this way, is so great, that it never could be gotten rid of, if the main part were not thrown away. The rubbish heap always receives four-fifths even of the eatable part of the produce.

138. It is not thus that the market gardeners proceed. Their rubbish heap consists of little besides mere cabbage stumps. No sooner is one crop on the ground than they settle in their minds what is to follow it. They clear as they go in taking off a crop, and, as they clear they dig and plant. The ground is never without seed in it or plants on it. And thus, in the course of the year, they raise a prodigious bulk of vegetables from eighty rods of ground. Such vigilance and industry are not to be expected in a servant; for it is foolish to expect that a man will exert himself for another as much as he will for himself. But if I was situated as one of the persons is that I have spoken of in Paragraph 137; that is to say, if I had a garden of eighty rods, or even of sixty rods of ground, I would out of that garden, draw a sufficiency of vegetables for my family, and would make it yield enough for a cow besides. I should go a short way to work with my gardener. I should put Cottage Economy into his hands, and tell him, that if he could furnish me with vegetables, and my cow with food, he was my man; and that if he could not, I must get one that could and would. I am not for making a man toil like a slave; but what would become of the world, if a well-fed healthy man could exhaust himself in tilling and cropping and clearing half an acre of ground? I have known many men dig thirty rods of garden ground in a day; I have, before I was fourteen, digged twenty rods in a day, for more than ten days successively; and I have heard, and believe the fact, of a man at Portsea, who digged forty rods in one single day, between daylight and dark. So that it is no slavish toil that I am here recommending.

KEEPING PIGS.

139. Next after the Cow comes the Pig; and, in many cases, where a cow cannot be kept, a pig or pigs may be kept. But these are animals not to be ventured on without due consideration as to the means of feeding them; for a starved pig is a great deal worse than none at all. You cannot make bacon as you can milk, merely out of the garden. There must be something more. A couple of flitches of bacon are worth fifty thousand Methodist sermons and religious tracts. The sight of them upon the rack tends more to keep a man from poaching and stealing than whole volumes of penal statutes, though assisted by the terrors of the hulks and the gibbet. They are great softeners of the temper, and promoters of domestic harmony. They are a great blessing; but they are not to be had from herbage or roots of any kind; and, therefore, before a pig be attempted, the means ought to be considered.

140. Breeding sows are great favourites with Cottagers in general; but I have seldom known them to answer their purpose. Where there is an outlet, the sow will, indeed, keep herself by grazing in summer, with a little wash to help her out: and when her pigs come, they are many in number; but they are a heavy expense. The sow must live as well as a fatting hog, or the pigs will be good for little. It is a great mistake, too, to suppose that the condition of the sow previous to pigging is of no consequence; and, indeed, some suppose, that she ought to be rather bare of flesh at the pigging time. Never was a greater mistake; for if she be in this state, she presently becomes a mere rack of bones; and then, do what you will, the pigs will be poor things. However fat she may be before she farrow, the pigs will make her lean in a week. All her fat goes away in her milk, and unless the pigs have a store to draw upon, they pull her down directly; and, by the time they are three weeks old, they are starving for want; and then they never come to good.

141. Now, a cottager's sow cannot, without great expense, be kept in a way to enable her to meet the demands of her farrow. She may look pretty well; but the flesh she has upon her is not of the same nature as that which the farm-yard sow carries about her. It is the result of grass, and of poor grass, too, or other weak food; and not made partly out of corn and whey and strong wash, as in the case of the farmer's sow. No food short of that of a fatting hog will enable her to keep her pigs alive; and this she must have for ten weeks, and that at a great expense. Then comes the operation, upon the principle of Parson Malthus, in order to check population; and there is some risk here, though not very great. But there is the weaning; and who, that knows any thing about the matter, will think lightly of the weaning of a farrow of pigs! By having nice food given them, they seem, for a few days, not to miss their mother. But their appearance soon shows the want of her. Nothing but the very best food, and that given in the most judicious manner, will keep them up to any thing like good condition; and, indeed, there is nothing short of milk that will effect the thing well. How should it be otherwise? The very richest cow's milk is poor, compared with that of the sow; and, to be taken from this and put upon food, one ingredient of which is water, is quite sufficient to reduce the poor little things to bare bones and staring hair, a state to which cottagers' pigs very soon come in general; and, at last, he frequently drives them to market, and sells them for less than the cost of the food which they and the sow have devoured since they were farrowed. It was, doubtless, pigs of this description that were sold the other day at Newbury market, for fifteen pence a piece, and which were, I dare say, dear even as a gift. To get such a pig to begin to grow will require three months, and with good feeding too in winter time. To be sure it does come to be a hog at last; but, do what you can, it is a dear hog.

142. The Cottager, then, can hold no competition with the Farmer in the breeding of pigs, to do which, with advantage, there must be milk, and milk, too, that can be advantageously applied to no other use. The cottager's pig must be bought ready weaned to his hand, and, indeed, at four months old, at which age, if he be in good condition, he will eat any-thing that an old hog will eat. He will graze, eat cabbage leaves, and almost the stumps. Swedish turnip tops or roots, and such things, with a little wash, will keep him along in very good growing order. I have now to speak of the time of purchasing, the manner of keeping, of fatting, killing, and curing; but these I must reserve till my next Number.

No. VI.

KEEPING PIGS--(continued.)

143. As in the case of cows so in that of pigs, much must depend upon the situation of the cottage; because all pigs will graze; and therefore, on the skirts of forests or commons, a couple or three pigs may be kept, if the family be considerable; and especially if the cottager brew his own beer, which will give him grains to assist the wash. Even in lanes, or on the sides of great roads, a pig will find a good part of his food from May to November; and if he be yoked, the occupiers of the neighbourhood must be churlish and brutish indeed, if they give the owner any annoyance.

144. Let me break off here for a moment to point out to my readers the truly excellent conduct of Lord WINCHILSEA and Lord STANHOPE, who, as I read, have taken great pains to make the labourers on their estates comfortable, by allotting to each a piece of ground sufficient for the keeping of a cow. I once, when I lived at Botley, proposed to the copyholders and other farmers in my neighbourhood, that we should petition the Bishop of Winchester, who was lord of the manors thereabouts, to grant titles to all the numerous persons called trespassers on the wastes; and also to give titles to others of the poor parishioners, who were willing to make, on the skirts of the wastes, enclosures not exceeding an acre each. This I am convinced, would have done a great deal towards relieving the parishes, then greatly burdened by men out of work. This would have been better than digging holes one day to fill them up the next. Not a single man would agree to my proposal! One, a bullfrog farmer (now, I hear, pretty well sweated down,) said it would only make them saucy! And one, a true disciple of Malthus, said, that to facilitate their rearing of children was a harm! This man had, at the time, in his own occupation, land that had formerly been six farms, and he had, too, ten or a dozen children. I will not mention names; but this farmer will now, perhaps, have occasion to call to mind what I told him on that day, when his opposition, and particularly the ground of it, gave me the more pain, as he was a very industrious, civil, and honest man. Never was there a greater mistake than to suppose that men are made saucy and idle by just and kind treatment. Slaves are always lazy and saucy; nothing but the lash will extort from them either labour or respectful deportment. I never met with a saucy Yankee (New Englander) in my life. Never servile; always civil. This must necessarily be the character of freemen living in a state of competence. They have nobody to envy; nobody to complain of; they are in good humour with mankind. It must, however, be confessed, that very little, comparatively speaking, is to be accomplished by the individual efforts even of benevolent men like the two noblemen before mentioned. They have a strife to maintain against the general tendency of the national state of things. It is by general and indirect means, and not by partial and direct and positive regulations, that so great a good as that which they generously aim at can be accomplished. When we are to see such means adopted, God only knows; but, if much longer delayed, I am of opinion, that they will come too late to prevent something very much resembling a dissolution of society.

145. The cottager's pig should be bought in the spring, or late in winter; and being then four months old, he will be a year old before killing time; for it should always be borne in mind, that this age is required in order to insure the greatest quantity of meat from a given quantity of food. If a hog be more than a year old, he is the better for it. The flesh is more solid and more nutritious than that of a young hog, much in the same degree that the mutton of a full-mouthed wether is better than that of a younger wether. The pork or bacon of young hogs, even if fatted on corn, is very apt to boil out, as they call it; that is to say, come out of the pot smaller in bulk than it goes in. When you begin to fat, do it by degrees, especially in the case of hogs under a year old. If you feed high all at once, the hog is apt to surfeit, and then a great loss of food takes place. Peas, or barley-meal is the food; the latter rather the best, and does the work quicker. Make him quite fat by all means. The last bushel, even if he sit as he eat, is the most profitable. If he can walk two hundred yards at a time, he is not well fatted. Lean bacon is the most wasteful thing that any family can use. In short, it is uneatable, except by drunkards, who want something to stimulate their sickly appetite. The man who cannot live on solid fat bacon, well-fed and well-cured, wants the sweet sauce of labour, or is fit for the hospital. But, then, it must be bacon, the effect of barley or peas, (not beans,) and not of whey, potatoes, or messes of any kind. It is frequently said, and I know that even farmers say it, that bacon, made from corn, costs more than it is worth! Why do they take care to have it then? They know better. They know well, that it is the very cheapest they can have; and they, who look at both ends and both sides of every cost, would as soon think of shooting their hogs as of fatting them on messes; that is to say, for their own use, however willing they might now-and-then be to regale the Londoners with a bit of potato-pork.

146. About Christmas, if the weather be coldish, is a good time to kill. If the weather be very mild, you may wait a little longer; for the hog cannot be too fat. The day before killing he should have no food. To kill a hog nicely is so much of a profession, that it is better to pay a shilling for having it done, than to stab and hack and tear the carcass about. I shall not speak of pork; for I would by no means recommend it. There are two ways of going to work to make bacon; in the one you take off the hair by scalding. This is the practice in most parts of England, and all over America. But the Hampshire way, and the best way, is to burn the hair off. There is a great deal of difference in the consequences. The first method slackens the skin, opens all the pores of it, makes it loose and flabby by drawing out the roots of the hair. The second tightens the skin in every part, contracts all the sinews and veins in the skin, makes the flitch a solider thing, and the skin a better protection to the meat. The taste of the meat is very different from that of a scalded hog; and to this chiefly it was that Hampshire bacon owed its reputation for excellence. As the hair is to be burnt off it must be dry, and care must be taken, that the hog be kept on dry litter of some sort the day previous to killing. When killed he is laid upon a narrow bed of straw, not wider than his carcass, and only two or three inches thick. He is then covered all over thinly with straw, to which, according as the wind may be, the fire is put at one end. As the straw burns, it burns the hair. It requires two or three coverings and burnings, and care is taken, that the skin be not in any part burnt, or parched. When the hair is all burnt off close, the hog is scraped clean, but never touched with water. The upper side being finished, the hog is turned over, and the other side is treated in like manner. This work should always be done before day-light; for in the day-light you cannot so nicely discover whether the hair be sufficiently burnt off. The light of the fire is weakened by that of the day. Besides, it makes the boys get up very early for once at any rate, and that is something; for boys always like a bonfire.

147. The inwards are next taken out, and if the wife be not a slattern, here, in the mere offal, in the mere garbage, there is food, and delicate food too, for a large family for a week; and hog's puddings for the children, and some for neighbours' children, who come to play with them; for these things are by no means to be overlooked, seeing that they tend to the keeping alive of that affection in children for their parents, which, later in life, will be found absolutely necessary to give effect to wholesome precept, especially when opposed to the boisterous passions of youth.

148. The butcher, the next day, cuts the hog up; and then the house is filled with meat! Souse, griskins, blade-bones, thigh-bones, spare-ribs, chines, belly-pieces, cheeks, all coming into use one after the other, and the last of the latter not before the end of about four or five weeks. But about this time, it is more than possible that the Methodist parson will pay you a visit. It is remarked in America, that these gentry are attracted by the squeaking of the pigs, as the fox is by the cackling of the hen. This may be called slander; but I will tell you what I did know to happen. A good honest careful fellow had a spare-rib, on which he intended to sup with his family after a long and hard day's work at coppice-cutting. Home he came at dark with his two little boys, each with a nitch of wood that they had carried four miles, cheered with the thought of the repast that awaited them. In he went, found his wife, the Methodist parson, and a whole troop of the sisterhood, engaged in prayer, and on the table lay scattered the clean-polished bones of the spare-rib! Can any reasonable creature believe, that, to save the soul, God requires us to give up the food necessary to sustain the body? Did Saint Paul preach this? He, who, while he spread the gospel abroad, worked himself, in order to have it to give to those who were unable to work? Upon what, then, do these modern saints; these evangelical gentlemen, found their claim to live on the labour of others.

149. All the other parts taken away, the two sides that remain, and that are called flitches, are to be cured for bacon. They are first rubbed with salt on their insides, or flesh sides, then placed, one on the other, the flesh sides uppermost, in a salting trough which has a gutter round its edges to drain away the brine; for, to have sweet and fine bacon, the flitches must not lie sopping in brine; which gives it that sort of taste which barrel-pork and sea-jonk have, and than which nothing is more villanous. Every one knows how different is the taste of fresh, dry salt, from that of salt in a dissolved state. The one is savoury, the other nauseous. Therefore, change the salt often. Once in four or five days. Let it melt, and sink in; but let it not lie too long. Change the flitches. Put that at bottom which was first put on the top. Do this a couple of times. This mode will cost you a great deal more in salt, or rather in taxes, than the sopping mode; but without it, your bacon will not be sweet and fine, and will not keep so well. As to the time required for making the flitches sufficiently salt, it depends on circumstances; the thickness of the flitch, the state of the weather, the place wherein the salting is going on. It takes a longer time for a thick than for a thin flitch; it takes longer in dry, than in damp weather; it takes longer in a dry than in a damp place. But for the flitches of a hog of twelve score, in weather not very dry or very damp, about six weeks may do; and as yours is to be fat, which receives little injury from over-salting, give time enough; for you are to have bacon till Christmas comes again. The place for salting should, like a dairy, always be cool, but always admit of a free circulation of air: confined air, though cool, will taint meat sooner than the mid-day sun accompanied with a breeze. Ice will not melt in the hottest sun so soon as in a close and damp cellar. Put a lump of ice in cold water, and one of the same size before a hot fire, and the former will dissolve in half the time that the latter will. Let me take this occasion of observing, that an ice-house should never be under ground, or under the shade of trees. That the bed of it ought to be three feet above the level of the ground; that this bed ought to consist of something that will admit the drippings to go instantly off; and that the house should stand in a place open to the sun and air. This is the way they have the ice-houses under the burning sun of Virginia; and here they keep their fish and meat as fresh and sweet as in winter, when at the same time neither will keep for twelve hours, though let down to the depth of a hundred feet in a well. A Virginian, with some poles and straw, will stick up an ice-house for ten dollars, worth a dozen of those ice-houses, each of which costs our men of taste as many scores of pounds. It is very hard to imagine, indeed, what any one should want ice for, in a country like this, except for clodpole boys to slide upon, and to drown cockneys in skaiting-time; but if people must have ice in summer, they may as well go a right way as a wrong way to get it.

150. However, the patient that I have at this time under my hands wants nothing to cool his blood, but something to warm it, and, therefore, I will get back to the flitches of bacon, which are now to be smoked; for smoking is a great deal better than merely drying, as is the fashion in the dairy countries in the West of England. When there were plenty of farm-houses there were plenty of places to smoke bacon in; since farmers have lived in gentleman's houses, and the main part of the farm-houses have been knocked down, these places are not so plenty. However, there is scarcely any neighbourhood without a chimney left to hang bacon up in. Two precautions are necessary: first, to hang the flitches where no rain comes down upon them: second, not to let them be so near the fire as to melt. These precautions taken, the next is, that the smoke must proceed from wood, not turf, peat, or coal. Stubble or litter might do; but the trouble would be great. Fir, or deal, smoke is not fit for the purpose. I take it, that the absence of wood, as fuel, in the dairy countries, and in the North, has led to the making of pork and dried bacon. As to the time that it requires to smoke a flitch, it must depend a good deal upon whether there be a constant fire beneath, and whether the fire be large or small. A month may do, if the fire be pretty constant, and such as a farm-house fire usually is. But over smoking, or, rather, too long hanging in the air, makes the bacon rust. Great attention should, therefore, be paid to this matter. The flitch ought not be dried up to the hardness of a board, and yet it ought to be perfectly dry. Before you hang it up, lay it on the floor, scatter the flesh-side pretty thickly over with bran, or with some fine saw-dust other than that of deal or fir. Rub it on the flesh, or pat it well down upon it. This keeps the smoke from getting into the little openings, and makes a sort of crust to be dried on; and, in short, keeps the flesh cleaner than it would otherwise be.

151. To keep the bacon sweet and good, and free from nasty things that they call hoppers; that is to say, a sort of skipping maggots, engendered by a fly which has a great relish for bacon: to provide against this mischief, and also to keep the bacon from becoming rusty, the Americans, whose country is so hot in summer, have two methods. They smoke no part of the hog except the hams, or gammons. They cover these with coarse linen cloth such as the finest hop-bags are made of, which they sew neatly on. They then white-wash the cloth all over with lime white-wash, such as we put on walls, their lime being excellent stone-lime. They give the ham four or five washings, the one succeeding as the former gets dry; and in the sun, all these washings are put on in a few hours. The flies cannot get through this; and thus the meat is preserved from them. The other mode, and that is the mode for you, is, to sift fine some clean and dry wood-ashes. Put some at the bottom of a box, or chest, which is long enough to hold a flitch of bacon. Lay in one flitch; then put in more ashes; then the other flitch; and then cover this with six or eight inches of the ashes. This will effectually keep away all flies; and will keep the bacon as fresh and good as when it came out of the chimney, which it will not be for any great length of time, if put on a rack, or kept hung up in the open air. Dust, or even sand, very, very dry, would, perhaps, do as well. The object is not only to keep out the flies, but the air. The place where the chest, or box, is kept, ought to be dry; and, if the ashes should get damp (as they are apt to do from the salts they contain,) they should be put in the fire-place to dry, and then be put back again. Peat-ashes, or turf-ashes, might do very well for this purpose. With these precautions, the bacon will be as good at the end of the year as on the first day; and it will keep two, and even three years, perfectly good, for which, however, there can be no necessity.