nterprising
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.

I had planned to devote lot No. 2 to a piggery. There are five acres in
this lot, a