145. The cottager's pig should be bought in the spring, or late in winter; and being then four months old, he will be a year old before killing time; for it should always be borne in mind, that this age is required in order to insure the greatest quantity of meat from a given quantity of food. If a hog be more than a year old, he is the better for it. The flesh is more solid and more nutritious than that of a young hog, much in the same degree that the mutton of a full-mouthed wether is better than that of a younger wether. The pork or bacon of young hogs, even if fatted on corn, is very apt to _boil out_, as they call it; that is to say, come out of the pot smaller in bulk than it goes in. When you begin to fat, do it by degrees, especially in the case of hogs under a year old. If you feed _high_ all at once, the hog is apt to _surfeit_, and then a great loss of food takes place. Peas, or barley-meal is the food; the latter rather the best, and does the work quicker. Make him _quite fat_ by all means. The last bushel, even if he sit as he eat, is the most profitable. If he can walk two hundred yards at a time, he is not well fatted. Lean bacon is the most wasteful thing that any family can use. In short, it is uneatable, except by drunkards, who want something to stimulate their sickly appetite. The man who cannot live on _solid fat_ bacon, well-fed and well-cured, wants the sweet sauce of labour, or is fit for the hospital. But, then, it must be _bacon_, the effect of barley or peas, (not beans,) and not of whey, potatoes, or _messes_ of any kind. It is frequently said, and I know that even farmers say it, that bacon, made from corn, _costs more than it is worth_! Why do they take care to have it then? They know better. They know well, that it is the very _cheapest_ they can have; and they, who look at both ends and both sides of every cost, would as soon think of shooting their hogs as of fatting them on _messes_; that is to say, for _their own use_, however willing they might now-and-then be to regale the Londoners with a bit of potato-pork.