Well, he had forty starved hogs shut up, and he gave them about as
much food each day as ten hogs could eat. Of course, they became like a
pack of wolves, and it was all a man could do to get through the yard.
Forty hogs would come all around him, squealing and yelling as though
they were being butchered, and you had to keep moving lively or they
would bite your legs. Henderson, one of the men, told me they ate up
four cats and three kittens and more chickens than had been on the table
for a year.

"One Sunday morning, after breakfast, I commenced to wash my shirt and
overalls, when Henderson called to me, 'Cattle in the peach orchard!'
Now, at the further end of the peach orchard there were a hundred nice
young trees, covered with tender foliage, looking fine. It seems the
cattle got into the orchard in the night and ate all the growth off
them, so they looked just like sticks. It really was a shame to see such
fine trees damaged in that way, but the boss would not take time to
build a good fence around them. That afternoon I went to lie down in the
barn; it was hot, the mosquitoes and flies were getting in their best
licks at me. I was trying to sleep, and just as I was about succeeding
Henderson called out: 'Charles, get your shovel and come quick.' 'What's
the matter?' I asked. 'Why, the hogs have played the devil and broke the
ditches and the water is running all over Hell.' Mad as I felt about
being disturbed, I could not help smiling within at the thought of water
running all over hell, and I said to him: 'If those hogs can flood hell
with water they ought to be sent to a dime museum.' We went on in
silence till we reached the orchard gate, when Henderson said: 'Do you
know, I would rather take a licking than open that gate, for it's a
back-breaker. It hasn't got a hinge, and is as heavy as an elephant; you
have to lift it up and drag it along the ground. It takes more time to
hang a gate that way with a band of iron to a post or a bent stick in
the place of the iron, than it would to buy two pairs of hinges; and yet
that is the only kind he has on the place. It seems as if everything on
the place was devised to make work as hard, unhandy, and wrong-end-to as
possible.'

"That evening when we had gathered together as usual, Harry opened the
conversation by saying: 'What a racket there was to-night at supper! It
seems to me the whole family is raising hell all the time, but I don't
blame the old woman much for gi