A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG


Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M. was obliging
enough to read and explain to me, for the first seventy thousand ages
ate their meat raw, clawing or biting it from the living animal, just
as they do in Abyssinia to this day. This period is not obscurely
hinted at by their great Confucius in the second chapter of his
Mundane Mutations, where he designates a kind of golden age by the
term Cho-fang, literally the Cooks' holiday. The manuscript goes on
to say, that the art of roasting, or rather broiling (which I take
to be the elder brother) was accidentally discovered in the manner
following. The swine-herd, Ho-ti, having gone out into the woods one
morning, as his manner was, to collect mast for his hogs, left his
cottage in the care of his eldest son Bo-bo, a great lubberly boy, who
being fond of playing with fire, as younkers of his age commonly are,
let some sparks escape into a bundle of straw, which kindling quickly,
spread the conflagration over every part of their poor mansion,
till it was reduced to ashes. Together with the cottage (a sorry
antediluvian make-shift of a building, you may think it), what was of
much more importance, a fine litter of new-farrowed pigs, no less than
nine in number, perished. China pigs have been esteemed a luxury all
over the East from the remotest periods that we read of. Bo-bo was in
the utmost consternation, as you may think, not so much for the sake
of the tenement, which his father and he could easily build up again
with a few dry branches, and the labour of an hour or two, at any
time, as for the loss of the pigs. While he was thinking what he
should say to his father, and wringing his hands over the smoking
remnants of one of those untimely sufferers, an odour assailed his