Uncle Dick and Lisa's Old Time Animal Tales

     About the year 1830, I settled at the Lower Peach Tree, in Wilcox county Alabama, and cultivated a few acres in corn and cotton, besides a small potatoe patch and a bit of garden as was usual in those days. My nearest neighbor, John Champion, being better off than the rest of us, had a nice gang of hogs, and feeling a little above his neighbors on account of his wealth, and being rather an overbearing man, was not particular whether his stock broke into other people’s fields or not. My crop was too small to feed my own family and John Champion’s hogs too, so I complained to him several times but got no relief, when being at old Erasmus Culpepper’s house one day, I heard him say, that if a foot, or an ear, or even a piece of bearskin was thrown down in a place where hogs use, that they would never show their snouts there again. I went home and got the skin of a bear which I had killed some time before, and having supplied myself with some corn, I went out and saw about twenty fine year olds, munching away in my field. I “toiled them up” and catching a good runner, sewed him up,in the bearskin, and then turned him loose, when he ran after the rest, who flew from the supposed bear. The last that was seen of them was at Basset’s creek, near forty miles from my house, only two being alive-one running from his fellow sewed up in the skin, and he trying to catch the other; the rest were found dead in the road, having literally run themselves to death. It is needless to add that John Champion’s hogs staid home after that.-[Newark Daily Adv.