"So I am--very wicked. Take care that you are not. Take care you are never wicked." "That I will. I can't bear that mother should cry." CHAPTER THE FOURTH. Janet did all she could to arrest the ruin which all saw to be inevitable. Her great piece of success was the training she gave to her eldest daughter, little Sally. By the time she was twelve years old, she was the most efficient person in the house. Without her, they could hardly have kept their last remaining cow; and many a time she set her mother at liberty to attend upon her father and protect him, when otherwise the children must have engrossed her. There was no cow-boy now; and her mother too often filled the place of the laborer, when the sowing or reaping season would otherwise have passed away unused. It was a thing unheard of in the district that a woman should work in the fields; but what else could be done? Raven's wasted and trembling limbs were unequal to the work alone; and, little as he could do at best, he could always do his best when his wife was helping him. So Sally took care of poor Dan and the four younger ones, and made the oaten bread with Willy's help, and boiled the potatoes, and milked and fed the cow, and knitted, at all spare minutes; for there was no prospect of stockings for any body, in the bitter winter, but from the knitting done at home. The children had learned to be thankful now, when they could eat their oat-bread and potatoes in peace. They seldom had any thing else; and they wanted nothing else when they could eat that without terror. But their father was now sometimes mad. It was a particular kind of madness, which they had heard the doctor call by a long name (delirium tremens), and they thought it must be the most terrible kind of all, though it always went off, after a fit of it, which might last from a day to a week. The doctor had said that it would not always go off--that he would die in one of the attacks. The dread was lest he should kill somebody else before that day came; for he was as ungovernable as any man in bedlam at those times, and fearfully strong, though so weak before and after them.