XIV.
Just about this time a foreign element entered the circle of Copenhagen students to which I belonged. One day there came into my room a youth with a nut-brown face, short and compactly built, who after only a few weeks' stay in Copenhagen could speak Danish quite tolerably. He was a young Armenian, who had seen a great deal of the world and was of very mixed race. His father had married, at Ispahan, a lady of Dutch-German origin. Up to his seventh year he had lived in Batavia. When the family afterwards moved to Europe, he was placed at school in Geneva. He had there been brought up, in French, to trade, but as he revealed an extraordinary talent for languages, was sent, for a year or eighteen months at a time, to the four German universities of Halle, Erlangen, Göttingen and Leipzig. Now, at the age of 22, he had come to Copenhagen to copy Palahvi and Sanscrit manuscripts that Rask and Westergaard had brought to Europe. He knew a great many languages, and was moreover very many-sided in his acquirements, sang German student songs charmingly, was introduced and invited everywhere, and with his foreign appearance and quick intelligence was a great success. He introduced new points of view, was full of information, and brought with him a breath from the great world outside. Industrious though he had been before, Copenhagen social life tempted him to idleness. His means came to an end; he said that the annual income he was in the habit of receiving by ship from India had this year, for some inexplicable reason, failed to arrive, dragged out a miserable existence for some time under great difficulties, starved, borrowed small sums, and disappeared as suddenly as he had come.