thirty-two now shall I sell them do you take this express office for a menagerie, answer quick.”
Morgan reached for a telegraph blank and wrote:
“Agent, Westcote. Don't sell pigs.”
He then wrote Flannery a letter calling his attention to the fact that the pigs were not the property of the company but were merely being held during a settlement of a dispute regarding rates. He advised Flannery to take the best possible care of them.
Flannery, letter in hand, looked at the pigs and sighed. The dry-goods box cage had become too small. He boarded up twenty feet of the rear of the express office to make a large and airy home for them, and went about his business. He worked with feverish intensity when out on his rounds, for the pigs required attention and took most of his time. Some months later, in desperation, he seized a sheet of paper and wrote “160” across it and mailed it to Morgan. Morgan returned it asking for explanation. Flannery replied:
“There be now one hundred sixty of them dago pigs, for heavens sake let me sell off some, do you want me to go crazy, what.”
“Sell no pigs,” Morgan wired.
Not long after this the president of the express company received a letter from Professor Gordon. It was a long and scholarly letter, but the point was that the guinea-pig was the Cava aparoea while the common pig was the genius Sus of the family Suidae. He remarked that they were prolific and multiplied rapidly.
“They are not pigs,” said the president, decidedly, to Morgan. “The twenty-five cent rate applies.”
Morgan made the proper notation on the papers that had accumulated in File A6754, and turned them over to the Audit Department. The Audit Department took some time to look the matter up, and after the usual delay wrote Flannery that as he had on hand one hundred and sixty guinea-pigs, the property of consignee, he should deliver them and collect charges at the rate of twenty-five cents each.
Flannery spent a day herding his charges through a narrow opening in their cage so that he might count them.
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