ass-room, and said:--

"Enrico, you are going to the floor above this year. I shall never see
you pass by any more!" and she gazed sadly at me. The director was
surrounded by women in distress because there was no room for their
sons, and it struck me that his beard was a little whiter than it had
been last year. I found the boys had grown taller and stouter. On the
ground floor, where the divisions had already been made, there were
little children of the first and lowest section, who did not want to
enter the class-rooms, and who resisted like donkeys: it was necessary
to drag them in by force, and some escaped from the benches; others,
when they saw their parents depart, began to cry, and the parents had to
go back and comfort and reprimand them, and the teachers were in
despair.

My little brother was placed in the class of Mistress Delcati: I was put
with Master Perboni, up stairs on the first floor. At ten o'clock we
were all in our classes: fifty-four of us; only fifteen or sixteen of my
companions of the second class, among them, Derossi, the one who always
gets the first prize. The school seemed to me so small and gloomy when I
thought of the woods and the mountains where I had passed the summer! I
thought again, too, of my master in the second class, who was so good,
and who always smiled at us, and was so small that he seemed to be one
of us, and I grieved that I should no longer see him there, with his
tumbled red hair. Our teacher is tall; he has no beard; his hair is gray
and long; and he has a perpendicular wrinkle on his forehead: he has a
big voice, and he looks at us fixedly, one after the other, as though he
were reading our inmost thoughts; and he never smiles. I said to myself:
"This is my first day. There are nine months more. What toil, what
monthly examinations, what fatigue!" I really needed to see my mother
when I came out, and I ran to kiss her hand. She said to me:--

"Courage, Enrico! we will study together." And I returned home content.
But I no longer have my master, with his kind, merry smile, and school
does not seem pleasant to me as it did before.

OUR MASTER.

Tuesday, 18th.

My new teacher pleases me also, since this morning. While we were coming
in, and when he was already seated at his post, some one of his scholars
of last year every now and then peeped in at the door to salute him;
they would present themselves and greet him:--

"Good morning, Signor Teacher!" "Good