nd carried off her son; and we watched them for a while,
walking in haste, and talking and gesticulating, both perfectly happy,
as though no one were looking at them.

MY FATHER'S TEACHER.

Tuesday, 11th.

What a beautiful excursion I took yesterday with my father! This is the
way it came about.

Day before yesterday, at dinner, as my father was reading the newspaper,
he suddenly uttered an exclamation of astonishment. Then he said:--

"And I thought him dead twenty years ago! Do you know that my old first
elementary teacher, Vincenzo Crosetti, is eighty-four years old? I see
here that the minister has conferred on him the medal of merit for sixty
years of teaching. Six-ty ye-ars, you understand! And it is only two
years since he stopped teaching school. Poor Crosetti! He lives an
hour's journey from here by rail, at Condove, in the country of our old
gardener's wife, of the town of Chieri." And he added, "Enrico, we will
go and see him."

And the whole evening he talked of nothing but him. The name of his
primary teacher recalled to his mind a thousand things which had
happened when he was a boy, his early companions, his dead mother.
"Crosetti!" he exclaimed. "He was forty when I was with him. I seem to
see him now. He was a small man, somewhat bent even then, with bright
eyes, and always cleanly shaved. Severe, but in a good way; for he loved
us like a father, and forgave us more than one offence. He had risen
from the condition of a peasant by dint of study and privations. He was
a fine man. My mother was attached to him, and my father treated him
like a friend. How comes it that he has gone to end his days at Condove,
near Turin? He certainly will not recognize me. Never mind; I shall
recognize him. Forty-four years have elapsed,--forty-four years, Enrico!
and we will go to see him to-morrow."

And yesterday morning, at nine o'clock, we were at the Susa railway
station. I should have liked to have Garrone come too; but he could not,
because his mother is ill.

It was a beautiful spring day. The train ran through green fields and
hedgerows in blossom, and the air we breathed was perfumed. My father
was delighted, and every little while he would put his arm round my neck
and talk to me like a friend, as he gazed out over the country.

"Poor Crosetti!" he said; "he was the first man, after my father, to
love me and do me good. I have never forgotten certain of his good
counsels, and also certain sharp