Time for one of Uncle Greybeard’s Instructive Tales. (Which you’ve probably heard before)
One day this city fella was tearing down a country road at top speed when he turned a corner and saw a lamb in the road. He slammed on the brakes but knew he couldn’t stop in time, when suddenly a 3-legged pig hopped out to the lamb in a single bound, grabbed its wool in his teeth and hopped safely to the grassy verge. When he pulled up, shaking, he got out and followed the 3-legged pig as it carried the lamb back to a farmhouse. The city fella knocked on the door and when the farmer answered, he told him what the pig had done. “That is no surprise to me” said the farmer “such actions are in every way typical of this noble beast”. (He was a funny sort of farmer btw). “Why when my dear spouse and I were slumbering in our nuptial bed, my alcohol distillation apparatus (used only for fuel purposes I may say) caught fire, and would in all likelihood have cast us into eternal sleep, were it not that the noble pig burst into our boudoir, dragged the brocaded quilt from our recumbent forms – thus waking us – and skilfully hurled it upon the fire, thus extinguishing the blaze which might else have extinguished our very lives. (He also liked really long sentences that farmer). The city fella was amazed but the farmer went on (and on) to tell him more tales of intelligence and heroism unparalleled in animal lore, all attributed to the wonderful pig. Finally the farmer drew breath and the city fella asked the question which had trembled on his eager lips for, oh, ever so long. “But how did he lose his leg?” he said, inquiringly. The farmer looked shocked and shook his head at the city fella’s ignorance. “A pig like that” he said “a pig like that, well! You don’t eat it all at once!”
And the moral of this story is, that there is no need to sell your children all at once. Like some of our old books of art, more profit may be made by selling them one page, as it were, at a time. Please feel free to pass this instructive tale on to your various children. Perhaps as a bedtime story?
