“Not that I sent the pig, or can form the remotest guess what part Owen could play in the business. I never knew him give anything away in his life. He would not begin with strangers. I suspect the pig after all was meant for me; but at the unlucky juncture of time being absent, the present somehow went round to Highgate. To confess an honest truth, a pig is one of those things I could never think of sending away. Teal, widgeons, snipes, barn-door fowls, ducks, geese--your tame villatic things--Welsh mutton, collars of brawn, sturgeon, fresh or pickled; your potted char, Swiss cheeses, French pies, early grapes, muscadines, I impart as freely unto my friends as to myself. They are but self-extended; but pardon me if I stop somewhere. Where the fine feeling of benevolence giveth a higher smack than the sensual rarity, there my friends (or any good man) may command me; but pigs are pigs, and I myself therein am nearest to myself. Nay, I should think it an affront, an undervaluing done to Nature who bestowed such a boon upon me, if in a churlish mood I parted with the precious gift. One of the bitterest pangs of remorse I ever felt was when a child--when my kind old aunt had strained her pocket-strings to bestow a sixpenny whole plum-cake upon me. In my way home through the Borough I met a venerable old man, not a mendicant, but thereabouts; a look-beggar, not a verbal petitionist; and in the coxcombry of taught charity, I gave away the cake to him. I walked on a little in all the pride of an Evangelical peacock, when of a sudden my old aunt’s kindness crossed me; the sum it was to her; the pleasure that she had a right to expect that I--not the old impostor--should take in eating her cake--the ingratitude by which, under the colour of a Christian virtue, I had frustrated her cherished purpose. I sobbed, wept, and took it to heart so grievously, that I think I never suffered the like; and I was right. It was a piece of unfeeling hypocrisy, and it proved a lesson to me ever after. The cake has long been masticated, consigned to the dunghill with the ashes of that unseasonable pauper. “But when Providence, who is better to us all than our aunts, gives me a pig, remembering my temptation and my fall, I shall endeavour to act towards it more in the spirit of the donor’s purpose. “Yours (short of pig) to command in everything, C. L.” When we have finished reading this, we wonder if we have not mistaken our standards of life; if the senses are not as truly divine as our dreams, and certainly far more within the reach of our realization. We think, we feel happy, we are certainly no worse. Whatever strange thing this humour may have done to us, we are more truly _men_ for having experienced it. And it is this that prose can do that poetry, even of the best, can never accomplish. CHAPTER III. _WHAT CONSTITUTES A GOOD NOVEL?_