Based on the story by Ellis Parker Butler
1954-05-21
N/A
10 min
Flannery, a railway agent does everything by the book. He gets into a scrape with a customer, McMorehouse, who wants to pay 44 cents freight for two guinea pigs which he considers pets. Flannery, however, considers them pigs (freight 48 cents), a decision he begins to regret when the animals begin to reproduce.
"Flannery" is the fastidious railway station master who speaks in rhyme and encounters an irate Scotsman who has come to collect his two pet guinea pigs. He wants to charge him 48 cents for the pig rate, the owner wants to pay 44 cents for the pet rate. A poetical battle ensues in the office before the Scot storms out and a slew of paperwork now ensues. Who is correct? Well it doesn't really matter when they start breeding and soon there are loads of the critters, then more, before a zoology professor rules that the owner was right all along. Then an huge administration is mobilised to amend the rules. Meantime, poor old "Flannery" now has 600 boxes of the animals and owner has gone awol. Leave well alone next time he thinks! It's quite fun this, and the rhyme works quite creatively to swipe at bloody-mindedness, red tape and we've even a short burst of "On the Bonnie, Bonnie banks"...
