Page:Max Havelaar; or, the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company (IA dli.granth.77827).pdf/115

 and “loves.” He had visited France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, England, Spain, Portugal, Russia, Egypt, Arabia, India, China, and America. As to his vicissitudes, he had many opportunities of experience, and that he had truly experienced much, that he had not gone through life without catching the impressions which it offered him so plentifully, was evidenced by the quickness of his mind and the susceptibility of his soul. What excited the wonder of all who knew or could conjecture how much he had experienced and suffered, was that you could see so little of that on his face. Certainly there was something like fatigue in his features, but this made you think rather of prematurely ripe youth than of approaching old age; yet approaching old age it ought to have been, for in India the man of thirty-five years is no longer young. His emotions too had remained young, as I said before. He could play with a child, and as a child, and often he complained that little Max was still too young to fly a kite, because he, “great Max,” liked that so very much. With boys he played “leap-frog,” and liked to draw a pattern for the girls’ embroidery: he even often took the needle from them and amused himself with that work, though he always said that they could do something better than that “mechanical counting of stitches.” With young men of eighteen he was a young student, liked to sing his Patriam canimus with them, or Gaudeamus igitur,—yes, I am not even quite certain, that not long ago, when