being late, had not even been home to eat a mouthful of supper, and they
were hungry.

But the younger ones, after half an hour of school, were falling off the
benches with sleep; one even went fast asleep with his head on the
bench, and the master waked him up by poking his ear with a pen. But the
grown-up men did nothing of the sort; they kept awake, and listened,
with their mouths wide open, to the lesson, without even winking; and it
made a deep impression on me to see all those bearded men on our
benches. We also ascended to the story floor above, and I ran to the
door of my schoolroom and saw in my seat a man with a big mustache and a
bandaged hand, who might have injured himself while at work about some
machine; but he was trying to write, though very, very slowly.

But what pleased me most was to behold in the seat of the little mason,
on the very same bench and in the very same corner, his father, the
mason, as huge as a giant, who sat there all coiled up into a narrow
space, with his chin on his fists and his eyes on his book, so absorbed
that he hardly breathed. And there was no chance about it, for it was he
himself who said to the head-master the first evening he came to the
school:--

"Signor Director, do me the favor to place me in the seat of 'my hare's
face.'" For he always calls his son so.

My father kept me there until the end, and in the street we saw many
women with children in their arms, waiting for their husbands; and at
the entrance a change was effected: the husbands took the children in
their arms, and the women made them surrender their books and
copy-books; and in this wise they proceeded to their homes. For several
minutes the street was filled with people and with noise. Then all grew
silent, and all we could see was the tall and weary form of the
head-master disappearing in the distance.

THE FIGHT.

Sunday, 5th.

It was what might have been expected. Franti, on being expelled by the
head-master, wanted to revenge himself on Stardi, and he waited for
Stardi at a corner, when he came out of school, and when the latter was
passing with his sister, whom he escorts every day from an institution
in the Via Dora Grossa. My sister Silvia, on emerging from her
schoolhouse, witnessed the whole affair, and came home thoroughly
terrified. This is what took place. Franti, with his cap of waxed cloth
canted over one ear, ran up on tiptoe behind Stardi, and in order to
provoke him, gav