But it may be this idea somehow got hold of Lazarus. I came home one evening and asked about the pigs. Elizabeth was doubtful. She had been out that day to look at them and was not encouraged by their appearance. She thought they had grown somewhat--in length. When I inspected them next morning, I thought so, too. I said that Hans and Gretel were no longer pigs they were turning into ant-eaters. Their bodies appeared to have doubled in length and halved in bulk. Their pudgy noses had become beaks. I was reminded of certain wild, low-bred pigs which I had seen splitting the hazel-brush of the West, the kind that Bill Nye once pictured as outrunning the fast mail. I said I feared our kitchen by-product was not rich enough for Hans and Gretel. Possibly that was true. Still, it would, have been better than nothing, which it appeared was chiefly what those poor porkers had been living on. Lazarus's love had waned and died. On chilly, stormy evenings it had been easier to fling the contents of his pail and pan out back of the wood-house than to carry them several times farther to the pen, while the supplementary "shorts" had been shortened unduly for Hans and Gretel. The physical evidence was all against Lazarus--the fascinations of the big open fire had won him; he had been untrue to the pigs. When he appeared, they charged him in chorus with his perfidy, and he could frame no adequate reply. Westbury came, and I persuaded him to take them at a reduction, and threw in Uncle Joe's pork and ham barrels. I said we wanted Hans and Gretel to have a good home--that we had not been worthy of them. They found it at Westbury's. There they were in a sort of heaven. When I saw them at the end of another two weeks they were again unrecognizable--they were once more pigs. We parted, with Lazarus about the same time. Our régime was not suited to his needs. It was a pity. With his gifts, the right people might have modeled him into a politician, or something, but we couldn't. We had neither the equipment nor the time. Nor, according to agreement, could we administer that discipline which, from our old-fashioned point of view, he sometimes seemed to require. We could only "send back to de home." Perhaps to-day he is "somewhere in France," making a good soldier. I hope so. IV _Westbury had advised against wheat_ But if our venture in pig culture had not been an entire success, our agriculture gave better promise. Our rye and grass seed had come up abundantly, and by November the fields, viewed from a little distance, were a mass of vivid green. There is something approaching a thrill in seeing the seed of your own sowing actually break ground and spring up and wax strong with promise. You seem somehow to have had a hand in the ancient miracle of life.