138. It is not thus that the market gardeners proceed. Their rubbish heap consists of little besides mere cabbage stumps. No sooner is one crop _on_ the ground than they settle in their minds what is to follow it. They _clear as they go_ in taking off a crop, and, as they clear they dig and plant. The ground is never without seed in it or plants on it. And thus, in the course of the year, they raise a prodigious bulk of vegetables from eighty rods of ground. Such vigilance and industry are not to be expected in a _servant_; for it is foolish to expect that a man will exert himself for another as much as he will for himself. But if I was situated as one of the persons is that I have spoken of in Paragraph 137; that is to say, if I had a garden of eighty rods, or even of sixty rods of ground, I would out of that garden, draw a sufficiency of vegetables for my family, and would make it yield enough for a _cow_ besides. I should go a short way to work with my gardener. I should put _Cottage Economy_ into his hands, and tell him, that if he could furnish me with vegetables, and my cow with food, he was my man; and that if he could not, I must get one that could and would. I am not for making a man toil like a slave; but what would become of the world, if a well-fed healthy man could exhaust himself in tilling and cropping and clearing half an acre of ground? I have known many men _dig_ thirty rods of garden ground in a day; I have, before I was fourteen, digged twenty rods in a day, for more than ten days successively; and I have heard, and believe the fact, of a man at Portsea, who digged forty rods in one single day, between daylight and dark. So that it is no slavish toil that I am here recommending. KEEPING PIGS. 139. Next after the _Cow_ comes the _Pig_; and, in many cases, where a cow cannot be kept, a pig or pigs may be kept. But these are animals not to be ventured on without due consideration as to the means of _feeding_ them; for a starved pig is a great deal worse than none at all. You cannot make bacon as you can milk, merely out of the garden. There must be _something more_. A couple of flitches of bacon are worth fifty thousand Methodist sermons and religious tracts. The sight of them upon the rack tends more to keep a man from poaching and stealing than whole volumes of penal statutes, though assisted by the terrors of the hulks and the gibbet. They are great softeners of the temper, and promoters of domestic harmony. They are a great blessing; but they are not to be had from _herbage_ or _roots_ of any kind; and, therefore, before a _pig_ be attempted, the means ought to be considered.