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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-pen. She proved, when fat, good bacon, 
juicy, and tender ; the rind, or sward, was remarkably thin. At a 
moderate computation she jvas 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 9th, 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. 
