The “hog and hominy,” supposed by an ignorant reading-public to have formed the main sustenance of the Virginian planter and his big family, are as popularly believed to have been raised upon his own farm or farms. Large herds of pigs were born and brought up on Virginia lands. Perhaps one-half of the pork cured into bacon by country and by village folk, was bought from Kentucky drovers. Early in the winter—before the roads became impassable—immense droves of full-grown hogs crowded the routes leading over mountain and valley into the sister State. We had notice of the approach of one of these to our little town before it appeared at the far end of the main street, by the hoarse grunting that swelled into hideous volume—unmistakable and indescribable—a continuous rush of dissonance, across which were projected occasional squeals. A drove had entered the village a week before Christmas, and rested for the night in the wide “old field” back of the Bell Tavern. Citizens of the Court House and from the vicinity had bought freely from the drovers. More than twenty big-boned grunters were enclosed in a large pen at the foot of our garden, and fed lavishly for ten days, to recover them from the fatigue of the journey that left them leaner than suited the fancy of the purchaser. On the morning of the cold day appointed for the “killing,” they were driven to a near-by “horse-branch” and washed. At noon they were slaughtered at a spot so distant from the house that no sound indicative of the deed reached our ears. Next day the carcasses were duly cut up into hams, shoulders, middlings (or sides of bacon), chines, and spareribs. Lean leavings from the dissection were apportioned for sausage-meat; the heads and feet would be made into souse (headcheese); even the tails, when roasted in the embers, were juicy tidbits devoured relishfully by children, white and black. Not an edible atom of the genial porker went to waste in the household of the notable housewife. The entrails, cleaned and scalded into “chitterlings,” were accounted a luscious delicacy in the kitchen. They rarely appeared upon the table of “white folks.” I never saw them dished for ourselves, or our friends. Yet I have heard my father tell of meeting John Marshall, then Chief Justice of the United States, in the Richmond streets one morning, as the great man was on his way home from the Old Market. He had a brace of ducks over one arm, and a string of chitterlings swung jauntily from the other. And why not? Judge Marshall had “Hudibras” at his tongue’s end, and could have quoted: “His warped ear hung o’er the strings, Which was but souse to chitterlings.” The Virginia house-mother had classic precedent for the utilization of what her granddaughter accounts but offal. I once heard a celebrated divine say, unctuously: “‘Hog-killing time’ is to me the feast of the year.”