Page:De Amicis - Heart, translation Hapgood, 1922.djvu/15



Monday, 17th.

T, is the first day of school.

The three months of vacation in the country have passed like a dream. This morning my mother took me to the Baretti schoolhouse to have me enter for the third elementary grade: I was thinking of the country, and went unwillingly. The streets were swarming with boys: the two book-shops were thronged with fathers and mothers who were purchasing bags, portfolios, and copy-books, and in front of the school so many people had collected, that the beadle and the policeman found it hard to