ig
would become merged in the indigenous type; and quoted horse-breeding
statistics to prove this. The side-issue was debated, at great length on
Pinecoffin's side, till Nafferton owned that he had been in the wrong,
and moved the previous question. When Pinecoffin had quite written
himself out about flesh-formers, and fibrins, and glucose and the
nitrogenous constituents of maize and lucerne, Nafferton raised the
question of expense. By this time Pinecoffin, who had been transferred
from Kohat, had developed a Pig theory of his own, which he stated in
thirty-three folio pages--all carefully filed by Nafferton. Who asked
for more.

These things took ten months, and Pinecoffin's interest in the potential
Piggery seemed to die down after he had stated his own views. But
Nafferton bombarded him with letters on "the Imperial aspect of
the scheme, as tending to officialize the sale of pork, and thereby
calculated to give offence to the Mahomedan population of Upper India."
He guessed that Pinecoffin would want some broad, free-hand work after
his niggling, stippling, decimal details. Pinecoffin handled the latest
development of the case in masterly style, and proved that no "popular
ebullition of excitement was to be apprehended." Nafferton said that
there was nothing like Civilian insight in matters of this kind,
and lured him up a bye-path--"the possible profits to accrue to the
Government from the sale of hog-bristles." There is an extensive
literature of hog-bristles, and the shoe, brush, and colorman's trades
recognize more varieties of bristles than you would think possible.
After Pinecoffin had wondered a little at Nafferton's rage for
information, he sent back a monograph, fifty-one pages, on "Products of
the Pig." This led him, under Nafferton's tender handling, straight to
the Cawnpore factories, the trade in hog-skin for saddles--and thence
to the tanners. Pinecoffin wrote that pomegranate-seed was the best cure
for hog-skin, and suggested--for the past fourteen months had wearied
him--that Nafferton should "raise his pigs before he tanned them."

Nafferton went back to the second section of his fifth question. How
could the exotic Pig be brought to give as much pork as it did in the
West and yet "assume the essentially hirsute characteristics of its
oriental congener?" Pinecoffin felt dazed, for he had forgotten what
he had written sixteen month's before, and fancied that he was about
to reopen the entire quest