“Look here, sir: did your tutor teach you to argue your uncle to death when you wanted to get your own way?”
“No, uncle.”
“Do you think I should be doing my duty as your guardian if I took you right away into a savage country, to catch fevers and sunstrokes, and run risks of being crushed by elephants, bitten by poisonous reptiles, swallowed by crocodiles, or to form a lunch for a fastidious tiger tired of blacks?”
“Now you are laughing at me again,” said the boy.
“No, sir. There are risks to be encountered.”
“They wouldn’t hurt me any more than they would you, uncle.”
“There you are again, arguing in that abominable way! No, sir; I shall not take you. At your ago education is the thing to study, and nothing else. Now, be quiet!” and Johnstone Murray’s eyes looked pleasant, though his freckled brown face looked hard, and his eyes seemed to say that there was a smile hidden under the grizzled curly red beard which covered the lower part of his face.
“There, uncle, now I have got you. You’ve said to me scores of times that there was no grander education for a man than the study of the endless beauties of nature.”
“Be quiet, Ned. There never was such a fellow as you for disputing.”
“But you did say so, uncle.”