smart

Calvin Gray is a swindler who won immediate sympathy from readers. It’s sleek, stylish, smart and full of life. However, the best thing about him is that he is sincere, noble and always on the right side of the law.

The narrator is a widower with two daughters, living happily into a rather troubling middle age and pushing away his daughter’s suitors so that his daughters would live with him a little longer. A younger neighbor persuades him to buy a pig and then bets that the boredom of life has so eclipsed his intelligence that he won’t be smart enough to stop someone from stealing it. If the narrator loses the...