We had other trouble with our cows, for they were ravenous after salt. We neglected to “salt them.” Result: If any article containing the least incrustation of salt was left outside our cabins, the entire herd would gather about it at night, lick it, fight for its possession and keep up a steady grunting, stamping, lowing, and bellowing. They would eat clothing left out over night on the clothes-line to dry. In such manner and for such reason also would they eat through the cotton walls of our houses. Once, when away for three days attending a county convention at Sonora, on returning to my lone cabin, I found it a scene of ruin and desolation. A cow had eaten through the cloth wall on one side, and eaten her way out at the other, and had stopped long enough inside to eat up all my flour, rice and vegetables. Once, when moving my household effects from one cabin to another, on a wheelbarrow, I left it near the middle of the flat for a few minutes. On returning I saw a cow making off with my best coat. She held it in her mouth by one sleeve. On seeing me she started off on a run, still thus holding the sleeve in her mouth and making violent efforts to eject it. The coat-sleeve was a ruin when I did get it. She had chewed it for salt’s sake to the likeness of a fish net. Keeping cows did not make our fortunes at Swett’s. Then everybody said: “Keep hogs. They will feed on acorns and increase very rapidly. In a few years the plains and hills will groan under the burden of your pork.” So I bought hogs. I bought a sow and seven pigs. They gave me much to think of. Before I had owned them a week complaints concerning them came from neighboring miners, who owned no hogs. These pigs of mine broke through the cloth walls of the cabins and would consume the miner’s entire weekly stock of provisions in a few minutes. Then they would go outside and root from out the hot coals--his “Dutch oven,” wherein his bread was baking while he labored afar in his claim, and this bread when cooled they would also devour. I had, on buying these animals, engaged that they should “find themselves.”