thieve. Much did I covet in this realm of steel, and LAMB'S MS. not least.
The essay occupies both sides of large sheets of foolscap, written in a
minute hand, with very few corrections, both the paper and the time
occupied in transcription, if not also in actual composition, being, I
should guess, the East India Company's. It is not, I imagine, the first
draft, but the first fair copy after all the changes had been made and the
form was fixed; and its author, if he is in any position to know what is
going forward on a planet which he left some six-and-eighty years ago, must
have been amused when he heard that so much money--thousands and thousands
of dollars--had been given for it at auction the other day.

Reading the essay again, in the faded ink on the yellowing paper, I
realised once more that everything that can be said about little pigs, dead
and ripe for the eater, had been said here and said finally. But the
living? That very evening I was to find little live pigs working for their
maintenance under conditions of which I had never dreamed, in an
environment less conducive, one would suppose, to porcine activity than any
that could be selected.

It was at Coney Island, that astonishing permanent and magnified Earl's
Court Exhibition, summer Blackpool and August-Bank-Holiday-Hampstead-Heath,
which New York supports for its beguilement. In this domain of switchbacks
and chutes, merry-go-rounds and shooting-galleries, dancing-halls and
witching waves, vociferous and crowded and lit by a million lamps, I came
suddenly upon the Pig Slide and had a new conception of what quadrupeds can
do for man.

The Pig Slide, which was in one of the less noisy quarters of Luna Park,
consisted of an enclosure in which stood a wooden building of two storeys,
some five yards wide and three high. On the upper storey was a row of six
or eight cages, in each of which dwelt a little live pig, an infant of a
few weeks. In the middle of the row, descending to the ground, was an
inclined board, with raised edges, such as is often installed in swimming-
baths to make diving automatic, and beneath each cage was a hole a foot in
diameter. The spectators and participants crowded outside the enclosure,
and the thing was to throw balls, which were hired for the purpose, into
the holes. Nothing could exceed the alert and eager interest taken by the
little pigs in the efforts of the ball-throwers. They quivered on their
little legs; they pressed