Page:The Gentle Grafter (1908).djvu/244

 feel like I’d done my duty to the world unless I added that Berkshire to my collection. Not intrinsically, but according to the ethics of pigs as friends and coadjutors of mankind, I offer you five hundred dollars for the animal.’

“‘Jeff,’ says this pork esthete, ‘it ain’t money; it’s sentiment with me.’

“‘Seven hundred,’ says I.

“‘Make it eight hundred,’ says Rufe, ‘and I’ll crush the sentiment out of my heart.’

“I went under my clothes for my money-belt, and counted him out forty twenty-dollar gold certificates.

“‘I’ll just take him into my own room,’ says I, ‘and lock him up till after breakfast.’

“I took the pig by the hind leg. He turned on a squeal like the steam calliope at the circus.

“‘Let me tote him in for you,’ says Rufe; and he picks up the beast under one arm, holding his snout with the other hand, and packs him into my room like a sleeping baby.

“After breakfast Rufe, who had a chronic case of haberdashery ever since I got his trousseau, says he believes he will amble down to Misfitzky’s and look over some royal-purple socks. And then I got as busy as a one-armed man with the nettle-rash pasting on wall-paper. I found an old negro man with an express 232