"In wandering through Covent Garden market, and passing from floral dreams to the vegetables, I often pause before the peas. Do I yearn for them in their adolescence? do I associate them with the duckling and the lamb? Nay; I await a time when they shall have folded and creased within themselves their _perfected_ saccharine excellence, to be released in the kitchen of the winter. "I can see a pig--a pig of one hundred and eighty pounds--classical in all the tints of its marble freshness. It sheds its internal graces in an excellent and cleanly market. With deft execution the white-aproned purveyor removes a _spare-rib_ from a side. Then in front of the site of the _spare-rib_ there remains an area of unequalled promise--a tract of the most delightsome possibilities. Let a piece be cut about fourteen inches long and eight wide, when after it has hung two or three days, I counsel thee to submerge it in sweet pickle for a week. Then boil it with a quart of the garden peas, with a shred, a hint, a sigh of onion. Allow it to cool, and when freed of every vestige of vegetable matter, place it in a garnished dish. "No poem ever stirred the human heart, no slab of tessellated pavement ever fired the archæologist, with respectful interest akin to that evoked by this entrancing esculent. It is a fresh wave in the sea of sapors--an approximation, a convolution of two entities divinely transfused, which to conceive, it must be tasted. It elevates the sense of taste to the highest pinnacle of human aspiration. It is a _memory_ to inspire gentle thoughts and tranquillize the mind; a _presence_ that is a beatitude, and that looms in the visions of the future as a thing to live for." Less secretive than communicative in most of his ways, the hog is nevertheless an enigma as regards his natural term of life. Not that for a moment his native modesty forbids his announcing his age, or that his lease of life equals that of Epimenides, but that, owing to circumstances over which he has no control,--the greed and voracity of man,--he is handicapped from proclaiming the full extent of his longevity. "The natural age of a hog's life is little known," observes the learned Hampshire rector-naturalist; "and the reason is plain--because it is neither profitable nor convenient to keep that turbulent animal to the full extent of its time." The man were a dolt who would take exceptions to White's natural-history observations, so lucidly and delightfully set forth in the pages of "Selborne." And yet, so great was his sympathy for all animals and dumb creatures, may not the term "turbulent" have been possibly a slip of the pen or fault of the types for "buoyant" or "complacent," with no malice prepense, as in the case of Spenser and the generality of the poets?