150 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 



LETTEE XXXIII. 



TO THE SAME. 



THE natural term of an hog's life is little known, and the reason is 

 plain because it is neither profitable nor convenient to keep that 

 turbulent animal to the full extent of its time : however, my neighbour, 

 a man of substance, who had no occasion to study every little advantage 

 to a nicety, kept an half-bred bantam-sow, who was as thick as she was 

 long, and whose belly swept on the ground till she was advanced to her 

 seventeenth year, at which period she showed some tokens of age by 

 the decay of her teeth and the decline of her fertility. 



For about ten years this prolific mother produced two litters in the 

 year of about ten at a time, and once above twenty at a litter ; but, as 

 there were near double the number of pigs to that of teats, many died. 

 From long experience in the world this female was grown very 

 sagacious and artful. When she found occasion to converse with a 

 boar she used to open all the intervening gates, and march, by herself, 

 up to a distant farm where one was kept ; and when her purpose was 

 served would return by the same means. At the age of about fifteen 

 her litters began to be reduced to four or five ; and such a litter she 

 exhibited when in her fatting-^en. She proved, when fat, good bacon, 

 juicy, and tender; the rind, or sward, was remarkably thin. At a 

 moderate computation she was allowed to have been the fruitful parent 

 of three hundred pigs : a prodigious instance of fecundity in so large a 

 quadruped ! She was killed in spring 1775. I am, &c. 



LETTEE XXXIY. 



TO THE SAME. 



SELBORNE, May 9tk, 1776. 



" . . . admorunt ubera tigres." 



DEAR SIR, We have remarked in a former letter* how much 

 incongruous animals, in a lonely state, may be attached to each other 

 from a spirit of sociality ; in this it may not be amiss to recount a 

 different motive which has been known to create as strange a fondness. 



My friend had a little helpless leveret brought to him, which the 

 servants fed with milk in a spoon, and about the same time his cat 

 kittened and the young were dispatched and buried. The hare was 

 soon lost, and supposed to be gone the way of most fondlings, to be 

 killed by some dog or cat. However, in about a fortnight, as the 

 master was sitting in his garden in the dusk of the evening, he 

 observed his cat, with tail erect, trotting towards him, and calling with 

 little short inward notes of complacency, such as they use towards their 



* Letter XXIV. 



