“What did you make of it?” asked the captain.
“Oh, I’ve tethered it to the tree yonder,” said Norman, pointing to one not a hundred yards distant. “By good luck I had a dog’s chain and collar which fitted the little creature exactly. I mean to try if I can’t rear it, and keep a tiger-cub as a pet.”
“A tiger-cub is rather a dangerous pet, I should say,” observed Captain Guise, with a smile.
“Oh, not a bit of it!” cried Norman, lightly; “the little brute has no fangs to bite with, and if it had, the chain is quite strong enough to”—
The sentence was never finished, for while the last word was yet on the smiling lips of the youth, the sudden sound of a savage roar from a neighboring thicket made him start, turn pale, and grasp his gun more firmly. Forth from the shade of the bushes sprang a large tigress. In a minute, with a few bounds, she had cleared the space between herself and her cub! Snap went the chain, as the strong wild beast caught up her little one in her mouth; and before either Norman or the captain (who had snatched up a second gun) had time to take aim, the tigress was off again, bearing away her rescued cub to the jungle!
“That was a sight worth seeing!” exclaimed Captain Guise; “I never beheld a more splendid creature in all my life!”
Norman, who was very young, and quite unaccustomed to having a tiger so near him with no iron cage between them, looked as though he had not enjoyed the sight at all. “I should not care to meet that splendid creature alone in the jungle,” he observed. “Did you not notice how the iron chain snapped like a thread at the jerk which she gave it?”
“Yes,” replied Captain Guise, as he turned back into the tent; “what will hold in the cub, is as a spider’s web to the full-grown wild beast. You had, as I told you, a dangerous pet, Norman Stanley. You might play for a while with the young creature, but claws will lengthen and fangs will grow. And,” the captain added more gravely, “this is like some other things which are at first but a source of amusement, but which are too likely to become at last a source of destruction.”
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 had been fostering something more dangerous still then 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.
