This fact made me think of myself. My refusal to black Ham's boots the day before had been the first log, and all my troubles seemed to be piling themselves up upon it. I thought then, and I think now, that I had been abused. I was treated like a dog, ordered about like a servant, and made to do three times as much work as had been agreed with my guardian. I felt that it was right to resist. There was no one to fight my battle, and that of my poor sister, but myself. I am well aware that I took upon myself a great responsibility in deciding this question. Perhaps, without the counsel of my brother, I should not have dared to proceed as I did. Bad as the consequences threatened to be, I did not regret that I had permitted the log to drift ashore.
Again that pine stick seemed like some great vice, sin, or error, which, having thrown itself up from the current of life, soon gathers many other vices, sins, and errors around or upon it. As this log had caught a score of others, so one false step leads to more. The first glass of liquor, the first step in crime, the first unclean word, were typified in this stick.
I was not much of a philosopher or moralist then, but it seemed to me that the entire heap ought to be cleared away; that the whole course of the river might be choked by it in time, if the obstruction was not removed. By detaching that first log, all the rest would be cast loose, and carried away by the stream--just as I had known old Cameron to become an honest, Christian man by cutting away the log of intemperance. I was about to use my setting-pole for the purpose of detaching the obstacle, when I happened to think that the lumber might be saved--just as the zeal of Paul, in persecuting the Christians, was the same zeal that did so much to build up the true church.
Why should I trouble myself to save the lumber? It would cost a deal of hard labor, and Captain Fishley would be the only gainer. I decided at once not to waste my time for his benefit, and was on the point of detaching the mischievous stick which had seduced all the others, when I heard a voice calling my name. I was rather startled at first, thinking it might be one of my tyrants in search of me.