The breakfast looked tempting. There was a pile of buttered toast, plenty of new-laid eggs, a beautiful griskin broiled to perfection, and water boiling on the hot turf fire in a saucepan. The teapot having taken to leaking, as Biddy said, she had made the tea in the potheen jug. I was just about to follow my uncle's example, when there came a rap at the outside door of the paved parlour in which we were sitting. "Come in," said my uncle. No one answered. "Go and see who it is, Terence; maybe it's some modest fellow who doesn't like to open the door." No sooner had I lifted the latch than I felt a heavy shove. The door flew open, and before I could get out of the way, in rushed a huge sow, knocking me over in a moment; and while I was kicking my heels in the air, over my body came nearly a dozen young pigs, their amiable mother making her way round the room, grunting, snorting, and catching the air through her enormous proboscis. "Jump up, Terence! jump up, or she'll be at you!" said my uncle, coming to my assistance; but the sow was too rapid in her movements, and, ere he could reach me, charged furiously at his legs. Fortunately he escaped her by springing with wonderful agility out of her way, and, mounting on a chair, got up on the top of a chest of drawers, which formed a convenient place of retreat. In the meantime I got on my legs, and, seeing the savage sow was inclined to attack me, I sprang on to the chest of drawers, the only safe place I could discover. Here we sat, regularly besieged, for our weapons of offence and defence had been left on the table. The sow, seeming to know the advantage she had gained, kept eyeing us savagely. Indeed, unless we had thought it worth while to run the risk of an attack from her, we saw that we must make up our minds to remain where we were. The louder we shouted for help, the more enraged the sow became, thirsting, as we had reason to believe, for our blood. She was the lankiest, the tallest, and grisliest beast I ever saw; her back, arching higher than a donkey's, resembled a rustic bridge; her loose-flapping ears nearly hid her small sunken, fiery eyes, their ends just covering one half of her mouth, which divided her head, as it were, into an upper and under storey, clearly showing that she had the means of taking a huge bite out of our legs, could she get at them. Her tusks, like those of a boar, projected from under her nostrils, and the ring and hook in her nose was a formidable weapon of offence, though intended to prevent her from digging up the ground. Her promising family were not little pigs, but had nearly attained the age when they would be turned out to shift for themselves, regular hobbledehoys of swinehood.