rshness, as he said,
clicking up and down the latch of the back-door,--

"Well, I'm sure you're as welcome as you are obleeged, and I'll knock up
that 'ere pen right off; he sha'n't pester ye any,--that's a fact."

Strange to say,--yet perhaps it might have been expected from her
proclivities,--Miss Lucinda took an astonishing fancy to the pig. Very
few people know how intelligent an animal a pig is; but when one is
regarded merely as pork and hams, one's intellect is apt to fall into
neglect: a moral sentiment which applies out of Pigdom. This creature
would not have passed muster at a county fair; no Suffolk blood
compacted and rounded him; he belonged to the "racers," and skipped
about his pen with the alacrity of a large flea, wiggling his curly tail
as expressively as a dog's, and "all but speakin'," as Israel said. He
was always glad to see Miss Lucinda, and established a firm friendship
with her dog Fun, a pretty, sentimental, German spaniel. Besides, he
kept tolerably clean by dint of Israel's care, and thrust his long
nose between the rails of his pen for grass, or fruit, or carrot- and
beet-tops, with a knowing look out of his deep-set eyes that was never
to be resisted by the soft-hearted spinster. Indeed, Miss Lucinda
enjoyed the possession of one pet who could not tyrannize over her.
Pink's place was more than filled by Fun, who was so oppressively
affectionate that he never could leave his mistress alone. If she lay
down on her bed, he leaped up and unlatched the door, and stretched
himself on the white counterpane beside her with a grunt of
satisfaction; if she sat down to knit or sew, he laid his head and
shoulders across her lap, or curled himself up on her knees; if she was
cooking, he whined and coaxed round her till she hardly knew whether she
fried or broiled her steak; and if she turned him out and buttoned the
door, his cries were so pitiful she could never be resolute enough to
keep him in exile five minutes,--for it was a prominent article in her
creed, that animals have feelings that are easily wounded, and are of
"like passions" with men, only incapable of expression.

Indeed, Miss Lucinda considered it the duty of human beings to atone to
animals for the Lord's injustice in making them dumb and four-legged.
She would have been rather startled at such an enunciation of her
practice, but she was devoted to it as a practice: she would give her
own chair to the cat and sit on the settle herself