cosmopolitan education, and was so quick at learning that before very
many weeks he spoke Danish almost without a mistake, though with a
marked foreign accent, which, however, lent a certain charm to what he
said. His extraordinary intelligence was not remarkable either for its
comprehensiveness or its depth, but it was a quicker intelligence than
any his Copenhagen fellow-student had ever known, and so keen that he
seemed born to be a lawyer.

Kappers spent almost all his day idling about the streets, talking to
his companions; he was always ready for a walk; you never saw him work
or heard him talk about his work. Nevertheless, he, a foreigner, who had
barely mastered the language, presented himself after six months--before
he had attended all the lectures, that is,--for the examination in
philosophy and passed it with _Distinction_ in all three subjects;
indeed, Rasmus Nielsen, who examined him in Propaedeutics, was so
delighted at the foreigner's shrewd and ready answers that he gave him
_Specially excellent_, a mark which did not exist.

His gifts in the juridical line appeared to be equally remarkable. When
he turned up in a morning with his Danish fellow-students at the coach's
house it might occasionally happen that he was somewhat tired and slack,
but more often he showed a natural grasp of the handling of legal
questions, and a consummate skill in bringing out every possible aspect
of each question, that were astonishing in a beginner.

His gifts were of unusual power, but for the externalities of things
only, and he possessed just the gifts with which the sophists of old
time distinguished themselves. He himself was a young sophist, and at
the same time a true comedian, adapting his behaviour to whomsoever he
might happen to be addressing, winning over the person in question by