change your name, may I inquire what your business is? It seems to be a
lucrative one, to judge by the accumulations of wealth you have allowed
me a glimpse of."

"Yes. Wealth is my occupation. I am a dealer in precious stones and
similar objects of value. Some day I will show you my diamonds; they are
worth seeing."

It is no uncommon thing to meet in India men of all Asiatic
nationalities buying and selling stones of worth, and enriching
themselves in the business. I supposed he had come with a caravan by way
of Baghdad, and had settled. But again, his perfect command of English,
as pure as though he had been educated at Eton and Oxford, his extremely
careful, though quiet, English dress, and especially his polished
manners, argued a longer residence in the European civilisation of his
adopted home than agreed with his young looks, supposing him to have
come to India at sixteen or seventeen. A pardonable curiosity led me to
remark this.

"You must have come here very young," I said. "A thoroughbred Persian
does not learn to speak English like a university man, and to quote
German proverbs, in a residence of a few years; unless, indeed, he
possess the secret by which the initiated absorb knowledge without
effort, and assimilate it without the laborious process of intellectual
digestion."

"I am older than I look--considerably. I have been in India twelve
years, and with a natural talent for languages, stimulated by constant
intercourse with Englishmen who know their own speech well, I have
succeeded, as you say, in acquiring a certain fluency and mastery of