Having accomplished the "First get your pig" part, the rest comes easy;
and at night, when the old Piper returns, his olfactories are sainted
with an odor that startles him from his generally despondent mood, and
awakens his curiosity as to the cause of such an unusual flavor from his
usually flavorless abode. He enters and finds a smiling wife and son,
with a smoking pig awaiting his coming. "What next occurred the Poet
tells us in the laconic words

"The pig was eat."

There was no necessity for describing the way of eating; the fact was
enough. But alas! there is always a dark side to everything, and this
happy family were no exception, The bones were left. They couldn't eat
them, and they didn't own a dog; so they picked them clean and threw
them away. But, "Murder will out," and the tiny bones told their own
tale. The village detective soon coupled the feet of the missing pig
with the unusual occurrence of a heap of bones before the door of the
musician's abode, and by a process of reasoning unknown to the
detectives of the present day, decided that those bones were a pig's
bones--a stolen pig's bones, from the fact that the Piper did not earn
enough to indulge in such luxuries as sucking-pigs. Now who stole the
sucking-pig?

Clearly not Madame Piper, for she was too fat and heavy to have any
light-fingered proclivities.

Clearly not the Piper himself, for he was playing his bagpipe and could
prove an alibi.

There was no one left but TOM. Circumstances pointed him out: he loved