“REALLY, Captain Guise, you need trouble yourself no more in the matter; I am quite able to take care of myself!” cried young Cornet Stanley, with a little impatience in his tone.

The speaker was a blue-eyed lad, whose fresh complexion showed that he had not been long in the burning climate of India. Cornet Stanley had indeed but lately left an English home, for he was little more than sixteen years of age. With very anxious feelings, and many tears, had Mrs. Stanley parted with her rosy-cheeked Norman. “He is so very young,” as she said, “to meet all the trials and temptations of an officer’s life in India!”

Mrs. Stanley’s great comfort was that her Norman would have a tried and steady friend in her cousin, Captain Guise, who would, she felt sure, act a father’s part to her light-hearted boy. Young Stanley was appointed to the same regiment as that of the captain; and almost as soon as the cornet had landed in India, he proceeded up country to join it. The season of the year was that which is in India called the cold weather, when many Europeans live in tents, moving from place to place, that they may amuse themselves with hunting and shooting. Norman Stanley, who had never before chased anything larger than a rabbit, was delighted to make one of a party with two of his brother officers, and enjoy with them for a while a wild, free life in the jungle. There would have been no harm at all in this, had Norman’s new companions been sober and steady young men; but Dugsley and Danes were noted as the two wildest officers in the regiment.

Captain Guise was also out in camp, and his tent was pitched not very far from that of his young friend Norman. The captain took a warm interest in young Stanley, not only for the sake of his parents, but also for his own; for the bright rosy face and frank manner of the lad inclined all who met him to feel kindly towards him. It was with no small regret that Captain Guise, on the very first evening when the officers all dined together, saw that young face flushed not with health, but with wine, and that frank manner become more boisterous than it had been earlier in the day. Not that Norman Stanley could have been called drunk, but he had taken a little more wine than was good for him to take; and his friend knew but too well in what such a beginning of life in India was likely to end.

The captain was a good and sensible man, and he could not see his young relative led into folly and sin without warning him of the danger into which he was heedlessly running. Captain Guise, on the following day, therefore, visited Norman in his tent, and tried to put him on his guard against too close a friendship with Dugsley and Danes, and to show him the peril of being drawn by little and little into intemperate habits.

Norman Stanley, who thought himself quite a man because he could wear a uniform and give commands to gray-bearded soldiers, was a little hurt at any one’s thinking of troubling him with advice. Captain Guise had, however, spoken so kindly that the lad could not take real offence at his words, but only tried to show his friend that his warning was not at all needed.

“I shall never disgrace myself by becoming a drunkard, you may be certain of that,” said the youth; “no one despises a sot more than I do, and I shall never be one. As for taking an extra glass of champagne after a long day’s shooting, that is quite a different thing, and nobody can object to it.”

“But the extra glass, Norman, is often like the thin point of the wedge,” said the captain; “it is followed by another and another, till a ruinous habit may be formed.”

“I tell you that I shall never get into habits of drinking,” interrupted young Stanley. Then, as he took up his gun to go out shooting, the cornet uttered the words with which this little story commences.

Captain Guise did not feel satisfied. He saw that his young friend was relying on the strength of his own resolutions, and in so doing was leaning on a reed. He could not, however, say anything more just then, and Norman Stanley started a new subject to give a turn to the conversation.

“By-the-by, Captain Guise, I’ve not shown you the prize which I captured yesterday. As Dugsley and I were beating about in the jungle, what should we light upon but a tiger-cub—a real little beauty, pretty and playful as a young kitten.”

“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.