ole family that way; only it would
not be good for them. You cannot feed even the dog or the horse or the
hens so. One meal a day for the dog; a limited ration of timothy for
the horse, and _scratch_-feed, for the hens--feed to compel them to
scratch for fear they will run to flesh instead of eggs; and the
children's wedge of pie you sharpen though the point of it pierces your
soul; and the potato you leave off of her plate; and you forgo
your--you get _you_ a medicine ball, I should say, in order to keep
down the fat lest it overlie and smother the soul.

Compelled to deny and subject the body, what do I then but get me a pig
and feed _it_, and scratch it, and bed it in order to see it fatten and
to hear it snore? The flesh cries out for indulgence; but the spirit
demands virtue; and a pig, being the virtue of indulgence, satisfies
the flesh and is winked at by the soul.

If a pig is the spirit's concession to the flesh, no less is he at
times a gift to the spirit. There are times in life when one needs
just such companionship as the pig's, and just such shelter as one
finds within his pen. After a day in the classroom discoursing on the
fourth dimension of things in general, I am prone to feel somewhat
removed, at sea somewhat.

Then I go down and spread my arms along the fence and come to anchor
with the pig.

[Illustration: Leafing]

XI

LEAFING

Poets, I said, have kept pigs for an escape from their poetry. But
keeping pigs is not all prose. I put my old clothes on to feed him, it
is true; he takes me out behind the barn; but he also takes me one day
in the year out into the woods--a whole day in the woods--with rake and
sacks and hay-rig, and the four boys, to gather him leaves for bedding.

Leafing Day is one of the days in red on the Mullein Hill Calendar; and
of all our days in the woods surely none of them is fresher, more
fragrant, more joyous, and fuller of poetry than the day we go to rake
and sack and bring home the leaves for the pig.

You never went after leaves for the pigs? Perhaps you never even had a
pig. But a pig is worth having, if only to see the comfort he takes in
the big bed of dry leaves you give him in the sunny corner of his pen.
And, if leafing had no other reward, the thought of the snoozing,
snoring pig buried to his winking snout in the bed, would give joy and
zest enough to the labor.

But leafing like every other humble labor of our life here in the Hills