Studies piscatorial and fleshy, and certain tricks connected therewith. Pork capers—a new dish.

Emboldened by the impunity with which they had foraged for themselves during the last three months that had followed the doings in our last chapter, both Twm and Moses grew somewhat daring in their gastronomical speculations. Moses, among his restless peerings for something to gratify appetite, had peeped into one of the mountain pools, and joyfully detected the existence of a certain sizeable fish there. This was a discovery which made the young Jew’s mouth water, and his eyes distend with visions of future work for the jaws! Here was an El Dorado of good food, and Moses went into proportionate rapture at the prospect. Twm annoyed him not a little, by laughing at his futile attempts to spear a pike with the dull and clumsy prongs of a dungfork.

Our hero was more successful in his warfare on the trout and eels that abounded in a brook which ran through one of the tarns. Without any contrivance that resembled fishing-tackle in the most remote degree, he remarked a sweeping curve, of a horse-shoe shape, in one part of the brook, and determined, with the assistance of Moses, on sporting his engineering skill, in cutting a new channel for the water, so that it might for the future, run a straight course, and leave the horseshoe portion of it dry. This at different intervals, with no small labour, they at last effected; and when the flood ran along the new channel, its deserted curve became a mess of slimy mud. Into this, with naked feet, they soon waded, and groping cautiously about, succeeded in gathering an abundant harvest of trout and eels. Moses was noisy in his raptures at the result, and so anxious to have them immediately cooked, that he could scarcely wait for that tedious progress.However, they soon kindled a fire by rubbing together some rotten wood, and with the aid of some dry turf, the quarry under the precipice of Allt y Craig became a temporary heath of blazing beauty. Utterly void of any culinary utensils, they resolved on the primitive mode of broiling their fish on hot stones, and Moses, all alacrity, proceeded on the task of preparing them.

But, alas, for the sequel of their adventure! Before they could realize their project, the dark countenance of Morris Greeg paralyzed their efforts, as the serpent’s gaze is said to fascinate its victim. The angry farmer gruffly demanded where they had been, how they had dared to idle away their time, and what was the meaning of that wasteful fire against the rock. The ready lie, or presence of mind as it is favourably called, of Twm and Moses soon supplied answers, such as they were. Twm said, that hearing the good woman of the house complain of a visit from the old enemy the cholic, he determined to catch a dish of fish for her, to drive it away, pointing triumphantly to his piscatory store; thus beating a retreat with all the diplomacy and tact of a good general, who when he finds he cannot obtain a victory, at any rate manages to gain credit for a wise ‘retrograde.’

Moses followed up Twm’s assertion by declaring that the fire was to frighten away the crows and the kites that might take fancy to the young lambs, or the wheat in the neighbouring field; a manifestation of care over his master’s property, which had, at any rate, the claim of originality to back it. Morris was as great an economist of his words as in matters of worldly goods, and therefore, whatever he thought, he did not waste breath with reply; but suddenly ordered Moses to carry the fish into the house, and Twm to give some hay to the cows. “And be sure,” quoth the careful farmer, “that you give most hay to the cow that gives most milk.”

“I will be sure of it!” replied Twm pointedly, and with sulky asperity. The next moment, to the great astonishment, and greater anger of Morris Greeg, he threw as much hay as his two arms could embrace, under the water-spout. “There,” cried the redoubted son of Catty, “that is the cow which gives me most milk, for that cursed broth and porridge is almost wholly made from this never-failing animal.”

A precipitous retreat of course, followed this explanation, and Morris Greeg was left alone to chew the cud of his resentment. At dinner the next day, the wrath of Morris having evaporated, all grew smooth again. While Twm and Moses bolted their insipid mess of dovery, otherwise called burgoo, the gratification was rather questionable in having as their share merely the smell of the fried fish, on which Sheeny and Shaan with the younger daughters were regaling, and praising the flavour at every mouthful they swallowed. Moses ground his teeth, and would have impaled them in the excess of his rage, for the loss of his expected feast. Twm said nothing, but inwardly resolved on faring better, and that very speedily. Shaan grinned like a hyena as she treated her dainty gums with fish after fish, and spitefully enjoyed their mortification, as she whispered to Twm, “now we are even for the pancakes.”

Just at the finishing of this mid-day meal, the barking of a strange dog drew Twm and Moses out to the yard. There they saw a half-starved cur, belonging to a cottager who was cutting turf in the adjoining turbary. This wretched animal, evidently a cut-throat leveller in principle, was disputing with one of the pigs his right to engross the whole trough to himself, which the bristly conservative at length resented by snapping in two one of the hind legs of his canine enemy.

The dog set up a dismal howl as a requiem for the loss of the fourth part of his understanding, which was soon silenced by Moses striking him on the head with a large stone, which killed him on the spot. The cottager hurried home, frightened by Twm, who told him would be sued for the damages done by his dog. Our hero, with the assistance of Moses, to whom he imparted the scheme he had now in hand, immediately bathed the buttocks of the pig with the dog’s blood; and then pouring some dry sand in his ear, drove him howling down the yard. Annoyed with the freedom thus taken with his auricular organ, the offended gentleman of the sty rushed to and fro, at a rate as violent as some of his celebrated ancestors, when they sought to drown both themselves and the devils within them in the sea. Morris lifted his hands amidst the assembled household, and ruefully exclaimed, “the devil is in the pig!” His gambols were certainly most extraordinary, and far surpassed the evolutions’ of the bull’s frisky wife, commonly called the cow’s courante. He sometimes aimed to stand on his hind legs, to emulate the figure, intimating in pantomime, “I am as good a man as the best of you!”

While in this position, he would toss his head as loftily as an envious beauty that heard her rival praised; and then, as if to evince his unrivalled versatility, he aimed to reverse his position, and stand on his head.

Thus did he enliven the farm-yard, and cut sundry unusual capers, not at all in keeping with the hitherto grave tenor of all his modest life; at which Morris was scandalized, the women astonished, and the two mischievous imps that caused this torture, amused as if a party of mountebanks had exhibited before them. “Such things have been in the days of old,” cried Morris, with a pious whine, “the pig is possessed of a devil.”

“Of a legion of devils!” screamed Sheeny and Shaan, in the utmost alarm; “the pig is mad!” cried Moses; “the dog was mad that bit the pig!” cried Twm. This remark, which assigned a natural cause for the frisky gambols of the tortured grunter, had the effect of sobering every one from their wild supernatural speculations, to the no less alarming fact that poor porker was the victim of hydrophobia. Morris all at once turned pious, and remarked that “this might be one of the signs which were to precede the end of the world.”

“Ah!” whispered Twm to Moses, “it is a sign which certainly precedes the end of the pig.”

Convinced by the reiteration of Twm and Moses, that the pig was really stark staring maliciously and mischievously mad, Morris seemed more grieved at his prospect of worldly loss in so much hog’s flesh, than as if his first suggestion had been verified about the dissolution of the world. He pathetically lamented the loss it would be, to kill him before he was duly fattened. “He must be killed and eaten fresh,” whined Morris, “as he is too lean to be salted and baconed.”

“He shall be killed and buried like a dog!” cried Sheeny, “or we shall all be maddened and biting one another, if we swallow a bit of him, fat or lean—Oh! the pity to lose this precious griskin!” “I won’t eat mad pork!” cried Shaan; “nor I,”—“nor I!” cried the younger lasses, deeply horrified at the idea of being smothered between two feather-beds, which Twm assured them, with a very grave and serious face, was an easy and comfortable death, and such as was always allotted by law to those who got mad by the bite of a mad dog, or by eating what was venomed by his bite. “I will never touch a bit of him,” cried all the girls at once; “but I will!” muttered both Twm and Moses, to themselves, glowing with the thought of future feasting.

Morris in the deepest tribulation pondered on the perversity of his household, and at last decided on waiting till next morning before he would give his ultimatum as to how the pig was to be disposed of, in the meantime locking him up in a stable. It was a night of trial for Morris. To lose an entire porker at one fell swoop, and the household to be so very unaccommodating as not to eat him, was a really serious thing. He mentally prayed for the renewed health on the part of the pig, or else that some kind pig-drover would fall from the clouds and be the saving angel of him. The said Morris Greeg’s conscience did not see further than his own acts. If the imaginary drover bought the pig, and others were made mad, why it was none of Morris’s concern. So much for his refined morality. Thus he comforted himself by reflecting, that whoever got mad with eating him, that was their concern, not his; as it would be unbecoming in him to dictate to others what they were to buy or to eat. And as to mentioning his faults, as some unreasonable readers require, he defied any one to prove that to be a fault, which was evidently his misfortune.

Boundless was the mirth of Twm and Moses, as in their season of rest they agitated the question as to what report they were to make in the morning. “Suppose,” said the waggish Jew-boy “that we let the pig out, and say that he escaped into the yard, and bit a goose, (which we can kill and eat;) that the goose got mad and bit the wheel-barrow; that the wheel-barrow dashed itself frantically against the dung-cart; and that both together they rolled and rattled all night about the yard, like the capering of ten thousand devils.” Twm over-ruled this wild suggestion, and gave a report more consonant with probabilities that the animal was more mad than ever, and that he feared his malady would infect the stable, so as to make it unsafe to put the horses there again till the walls were white-washed and every part of it purified.

This was a grave and plausible position in which to place the affair, and quite fell in with Morris’s own way of thinking; and at last he determined on having the maddened monster, as he called him, killed and buried. This was at last carried into effect by our young worthies, with the assistance of Mike the mat-man, who inhabited a wretched hovel in the neighbourhood, and maintained himself, a wife, and one child, by making rush mats, and coarse willow baskets, which he hawked over the country. Mike, of course, was let into the secret, and in the night the worthy trio commenced their avocations of body-snatchers. The much injured porker was disinterred, and more honours were paid him after death, than had ever been conferred upon him in life. But this is the way with human beings, sometimes, as well as with the denizens of the sty; and if we choose to moralize, we have an excellent opportunity given us—but we forbear.

Many and merry were the evenings spent over the remains of the pork, by Twm and Moses, under the humble roof of Mike the mat-man and his wife, who were equal partakers of the feast. These promising youths, on pretending to retire to their nightly rest, made a point of hastening to the place of goodly food and pleasant smells, where they spent the greater part of the night, and thus acquired their earliest taste for dissipation.