It was a sight to banish bachelorship from the world, to watch the joy of the Sergeant with Charlie from the day he experienced the new and indescribable feelings of being a father, until the flaxen-haired blue-eyed boy was able to _toddle_ to his waiting arms, and then be mounted on his shoulders, while he stepped round the room to the tune of the old familiar regimental march, performed by him with half-whistle half-trumpet tones, which vainly expressed the roll of the band that crashed harmoniously in memory’s ear. Katie "didna let on" her motherly pride and delight at the spectacle, which never became stale or common-place. Adam had a weakness for pets. Dare we call such tastes a weakness, and not rather a minor part of his religion, which included within its wide embrace a love of domestic animals, in which he saw, in their willing dependence on himself, a reflection of more than they could know, or himself even fully understand? At the time we write a starling was his special friend. It had been caught and tamed for his boy Charlie. Adam had taught the creature with greatest care to speak with precision. Its first and most important lesson, was, "I’m Charlie’s bairn". And one can picture the delight with which the child heard this innocent confession, as the bird put his head askance, looked at him with his round full eye, and in clear accents acknowledged his parentage: "I’m Charlie’s bairn!" The boy fully appreciated his feathered confidant, and soon began to look upon him as essential to his daily enjoyment. The Sergeant had also taught the starling to repeat the words, "A man’s a man for a’ that", and to whistle a bar or two of the ditty, "Wha’ll be king but Charlie!" Katie had more than once confessed that she "wasna unco’ fond o’ this kind o’ diversion". She pronounced it to be "neither natural nor canny", and had often remonstrated with the Sergeant for what she called his "idle, foolish, and even profane" painstaking in teaching the bird. But one night, when the Sergeant announced that the education of the starling was complete, she became more vehement than usual on this assumed perversion of the will of Providence. "Nothing," said the Sergeant, "can be more beautiful than his ’A man’s a man for a’ that’." "The mair’s the pity, Adam!" said Katie. "It’s wrang--clean wrang--I tell ye; and ye’ll live tae rue’t. What right has _he_ to speak? cock him up wi’ his impudence! There’s mony a bairn aulder than him canna speak sae weel. It’s no’ a safe business, I can tell you, Adam."