sked
Hugh whether he had got justice yet in that quarter: and then Hugh
laughed; and Firth saw that he had gained something quite as good,--a
power of doing without it good-humouredly, from those who were so
unhappy as not to understand or care for justice.

In one respect, however, Hugh was still within Lamb's power. When Lamb
was not skulking, he was much given to boasting; and his boasts were
chiefly about what a great man he was to be in India. He was really
destined for India; and his own opinion was that he should have a fine
life of it there, riding on an elephant, with a score of servants always
about him, spending all his mornings in shooting, and all his evenings
at dinners and balls. Hugh did not care about the servants, sport, or
dissipation; and he did not see why any one should cross the globe to
enjoy things like these, which might be had at home. But it did make
him sigh to think that a lazy and ignorant boy should be destined to
live among those mountains, and that tropical verdure of which he had
read,--to see the cave-temples, the tanks, the prodigious rivers, and
the natives and their ways, of which his imagination was full, while he
must stay at home, and see nothing beyond London, as long as he lived.
He did not grudge Holt his prospect of going to India; for Holt was an
improved and improving boy, and had, moreover, a father there whom he
loved very much: but Hugh could never hear Lamb's talk about India
without being ready to cry.

"Do you think," he said to Holt, "that all this is true?"

"It is true that he is to go to India. His father has interest to get
him out. But I do not believe he will like it so well as he thinks. At
least, I know that my father has to work pretty hard,--harder than Lamb
ever worked, or ever will work."

"O dear! I wish I could go and do the work; and I would send all the
money home to him (except just enough to live upon), and then he might
go to dinners and balls in London, as much as he liked, and I could see
the Hindoos and the cave-temples."

"That is another mistake of Lamb's,--about the quantity of money," said
Holt. "I do not believe anybody in India is so rich as he pretends, if
they work ever so hard. I know my father works as hard as anybody, and
he is not rich; and I know the same of several of his friends. So it is
hardly likely that such a lazy dunce as Lamb should be rich, unless he
has a fortune here at home; and if he had that, I do not