Norman Stanley's cheek reddened, for he felt that it was not merely of a tiger's cub that his friend was speaking. Evil habits, which at first seem so weak that we believe that we can hold them in by a mere effort of will, grow fearfully strong by indulgence. Many a wretched drunkard has begun by what he called merely a little harmless mirth, but has found at last that he has been fostering something more dangerous still than a tiger's cub. His good resolutions have snapped; he has been carried away by a terrible force with which he has not had the strength to grapple; and so has proved the truth of the captain's words, that what is at first but a source of amusement may be at last a source of destruction.
"NO, neighbour, you've not one too many," observed Bridget Macbride, as she stood in the doorway of the cottage of Janet Maclean, knitting coarse gray socks as fast as her fingers could go.
"It's easy enough for you to say so," replied Janet, who was engaged in ironing out a shirt, and who seemed to be too busy even to look up as she spoke—"it's easy enough for you to say so, Bridget Macbride. You've never had but three bairns [children] in your life, and your husband, he gets good wages. You'd sing to a different tune, I take it, if you'd nine bairns, as I ha'e, the oldest not twelve years old—nine to feed, to clothe, and to house, and to toil and moil for, and your goodman getting but seven shillings a-week, though he's after the sheep from morning till night!" Mrs. Maclean had been getting quite red in the face as she spoke, but that might have been from stooping over her ironing work.
"Still, children are blessings,—at least, I always thought mine so," observed Bridget Macbride.
"Blessings; yes, to be sure!" cried Janet. "I thought so too, till there were so many of them that we had to pack in the cottage like herrings in a barrel."
Janet was now ironing out a sleeve, and required to go rather more gently on with her work. "I'm sure nae folk welcomed little ones more than Tam and I did the four first wee bairns, though many a broken night's rest we had wi' poor Jeanie,—and I shall never forget the time when the measles was in our cottage, and every ane o' the four had it! Yes," the mother went on, "four we could manage pretty well, with a wee bit o' pinching and scraping; but then came twins; and then little Davie; and afore he could toddle alane, twins again!" And Janet banged down her iron on its stand, as if two sets of twins were too much for the patience of any parent to endure.
"You must have a struggle to keep them all," observed Bridget Macbride.