Leaving the hot-house we took a look at the hogs. During the summer they are kept in enclosures out in the open and in the winter they live in the log henneries, which have been turned into pig pens. The buildings are warmed with good stoves, and the fires are kept up day and night. In the winter the pigs are fed upon potatoes and grain. Their food is cooked and served hot morning and evening. Every bit of manure is saved, Billy says, for the soil of the Yukon needs fertilizing, and this by-product is worth almost four times as much as in the United States. I went with Billy from pen to pen to examine the stock. It is said that a man may be known by the way animals act in his presence; that if they like him he is to be trusted, if not, he is a man to be watched. If this is true, Chicken Billy should sprout angel’s wings. His hogs seemed to love him. He talked to them as though they were human, and they lay down and rolled over like pet dogs. One of his biggest boars did tricks. The babies of the hog pens were of all ages, from little red piggies as big as a kitten to lusty black Berkshires the size of a fox terrier. Chicken Billy started in the hog business with fourteen pigs--Duroc-Jerseys, Berkshires, and Yorkshires--most of which had taken prizes at the agricultural fair at Vancouver. He bought them for sixty dollars apiece, and shipped them into the Klondike for breeding purposes. Leaving the pigs, we went to the farmhouse, a log cabin of two rooms besides a kitchen. The earth was banked up around the outside to keep out the winter cold, and inside were great stoves. For dinner we had eggs fresh from the hens, fried with ham that fairly melted in our mouths. There were mealy potatoes as good as any that ever came out of Ireland, although they had been harvested more than a year before. The bread was made by Billy’s hired man, and there were more cucumbers than we could possibly eat. After dinner we took a skiff and rowed from the island over to Billy’s potato farm on the mainland. This farm was on the banks of the Yukon, and the crop was raised within a stone’s throw of the river in a seventeen-acre field a half mile long. I have seen many farms, but none better cultivated and more free from weeds than this potato patch. The rows were perfectly straight and the vines reached to my knees. Billy told me he hoped to get six or seven tons to the acre, or more than three thousand bushels in all. At one hundred dollars a ton the gross receipts would be something like ten thousand dollars. In the centre of the patch is a log cabin with a great cellar where the potatoes are stored until shipped to market. This is so well built and so insulated with air spaces that the potatoes do not freeze, even in the severest weather.