THE WITCH'S PIG: A Cornish Folktale

In her usual calculated rhythms, Mary Calhoun tells how Tom, believing his cousin Betty to be just a noddy old woman and not a witch as gossip would have it, slyly outbids her for a pig at market and then gets nothing but trouble out of his purchase. At last, with Tom on his way to sell the now skinny sow, a hare leads it on a wild chase and into a tight-fitting drainpipe, from which Betty appears to extricate it, after buying it from Tom for a pittance. Tom's left with a new respect for ""she who could take the shape of a hare""; readers are left with a passable tale, slightly overflavored in the telling, but oddly enough not vivified in the particulars--or in McCrady's higgledy-piggledy scenes.