ape of the neck with his hand, "Courage, my lad;
you will find your mother well and happy."

This companionship comforted him; his sad presentiments were turned into
joyous ones. Seated on the bow, beside the aged peasant, who was smoking
his pipe, beneath the beautiful starry heaven, in the midst of a group
of singing peasants, he imagined to himself in his own mind a hundred
times his arrival at Buenos Ayres; he saw himself in a certain street;
he found the shop, he flew to his cousin. "How is my mother? Come, let
us go at once! Let us go at once!" They hurried on together; they
ascended a staircase; a door opened. And here his mute soliloquy came to
an end; his imagination was swallowed up in a feeling of inexpressible
tenderness, which made him secretly pull forth a little medal that he
wore on his neck, and murmur his prayers as he kissed it.

On the twenty-seventh day after their departure they arrived. It was a
beautiful, rosy May morning, when the steamer cast anchor in the immense
river of the Plata, near the shore along which stretches the vast city
of Buenos Ayres, the capital of the Argentine Republic. This splendid
weather seemed to him to be a good augury. He was beside himself with
joy and impatience. His mother was only a few miles from him! In a few
hours more he would have seen her! He was in America, in the new world,
and he had had the daring to come alone! The whole of that extremely
long voyage now seemed to him to have passed in an instant. It seemed to
him that he had flown hither in a dream, and that he had that moment
waked. And he was so happy, that he hardly experienced any surprise or
distress when he felt in his pockets and found only one of the two
little heaps into which he had divided his little treasure, in order to
be the more sure of not losing the whole of it. He had been robbed; he
had only a few lire left; but what mattered that to him, when he was
near his mother? With his bag in his hand, he descended, in company
with many other Italians, to the tug-boat which carried him within a
short distance of the shore; clambered down from the tug into a boat
which bore the name of _Andrea Doria_; was landed on the wharf; saluted
his old Lombard friend, and directed his course, in long strides,
towards the city.

On arriving at the entrance of the first street, he stopped a man who
was passing by, and begged him to show him in what direction he should
go in order to reach the street of _l