Page:De Amicis - Heart, translation Hapgood, 1922.djvu/132

 said a gentle word to an inferior, replied in an indescribably sweet and tender voice, “I am only a captain; you are a hero.”

He bent over with wide-spread arms upon the drummer-boy, and pressed him three times to his heart.

Tuesday, 24th.

Since the tale of the Drummer-boy has touched your heart, it should be easy for you this morning to write your composition for examination—Why you love Italy—well. Why do I love Italy? Do not a hundred answers present themselves to you on the instant? I love Italy because my mother is an Italian; because the blood that flows in my veins is Italian; because the soil in which are buried the dead whom my mother mourns and whom my father venerates is Italian; because the town in which I was born, the language that I speak, the books that educate me, because my brother, my sister, my comrades, the great people among whom I live, and the beautiful nature which surrounds me, and all that I see, that I love, that I study, that I admire, is Italian.

Oh, you cannot feel that affection to the full! You will feel it when you become a man; when, returning from a long journey, after a prolonged absence, you step up in the morning to the bulwarks of the vessel and see on the distant horizon the lofty blue mountains of your country; you will feel it then in the impetuous flood of tenderness which will fill your eyes with tears and will wrest a cry from your heart. You will feel it in some great and distant city, in that impulse of the soul which will draw you from the strange throng towards a working man from whom you have heard in passing a word