It may not be out of order to mention that you quite frequently sit upon
P.S. Just a suggestion. A leading grocer here says, that if the labels on our canned goods did not display the name "Graham" so prominently, he thinks he could sell some of them.
_A farmhouse, a farmer's daughter and bucolic pleasures and pastimes give Pierrepont a respite from commercial activities, but not from the study of pig._
I take it that you are now enough of a philosopher to suppress any surprise you may feel to see a letter dated at this outpost of civilization. I admit that it's somewhat off the beaten track for the distribution of lard and pork products, but I got here legitimately enough, as you shall learn. The people hereabouts raise their own hogs, and I believe it would interest you to see the real article. Their lard is so attractive in appearance that I mistook it for vanilla ice cream when shown some last night, not stopping to think that your simon-pure farmer never uses his cream for such frivolous purposes. However, their stuff showed me that the nearer you get to nature and the farther from the stock-yards, the more respectable an animal is the pig.
But to the adventure that brought me here. I left for the southern part of the state yesterday morning on the Gatling Gun Express, and all went well until we struck a cow at about noon, a few miles from where I have pitched the Graham headquarters. The cow is now beef, all right, but the locomotive is also scrap-iron. The track was blocked for keeps at the lonely crossing where the horror occurred, and there seemed to be no escape from a dreary wait for the wrecking train. But I investigated, and soon discovered an ancient farmer with a horse whose meridian of life had long since passed, jogging along toward somewhere--anywhere, away from the slough of despond in which the cow had deposited us. I grabbed my samples--which, by the way, are of no earthly use in this section of the world--and begged for transportation. I got it for twenty-five cents and a cigar whose antecedents I fain would forget, and started for the interior.
It was an interesting locality where we brought up. Doolittle's Mills are apparently so named because there's so little doing in them that the building which gives the place its name looks like a church where all the citizens are atheists. Once a year, in the time of the early spring freshets, they saw a few boards for exercise. But just now the farmers have the call, and the call is usually the tin-horn summons to dinner, which is the only sound that awakes any interest in the people. Just now they are putting in potatoes, corn, and beans, and the only fertilizer they use are cuss words and hard cider, which go well enough together at the start, but don't hitch worth a cent at harvest time.