At a venture I should not say that there were more
black pigs in Old Castile than in Andalusia, as we observed them from
the train, rooting among the unpromising stubble of the wheat-lands.
Rather I should say that the prevailing pig of all the Spains was brown,
corresponding to the reddish blondness frequent among both the Visigoths
and the Moors. The black pig was probably the original, prehistoric
Iberian pig, or of an Italian strain imported by the Romans; but I do
not offer this as more than a guess. The Visigothic or Arabic pig showed
himself an animal of great energy and alertness wherever we saw him, and
able to live upon the lean of the land where it was leanest. At his
youngest he abounded in the furrows and hollows, matching his russet
with the russet of the soil and darting to and fro with the quickness of
a hare. He was always of an ingratiating humorousness and endeared
himself by an apparent readiness to enter into any joke that was going,
especially that of startling the pedestrian by his own sudden apparition
from behind a tuft of grass or withered stalk. I will not be sure, but
I think we began to see his kind as soon as we got out of Yalladolid,
when we began running through a country wooded with heavy, low-crowned
pines that looked like the stone-pines of Italy, but were probably not
the same.
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