Page:De Amicis - Heart, translation Hapgood, 1922.djvu/150

 and ears; and beside the litter walked a woman with a baby in her arms, who seemed crazy, and who shrieked from time to time, “He is dead! He is dead! He is dead!”

Behind the woman came a boy who had a satchel under his arm and who was sobbing.

“What has happened?” asked my father. A neighbor replied, that the man was a mason who had fallen from the fourth story while at work. The bearers of the litter halted for a moment. Many turned away their faces in horror. I saw the schoolmistress of the red feather supporting my mistress of the upper first, who was almost in a swoon. At the same moment I felt a touch on the elbow; it was the “little mason”,  who was ghastly white and trembling from head to foot. He was certainly thinking of his father. I was thinking of him, too. I, at least, am at peace in my mind while I am in school: I know that my father is at home, seated at his table, far removed from all danger; but how many of my companions think that their fathers are at work on a very high bridge or close to the wheels of a machine, and that a movement, a single false step, may cost them their lives! They are like so many sons of soldiers who have fathers in the battle. “Muratorino” gazed and gazed, and trembled more and more, and my father noticed it and said:—

“Go home, my boy; go at once to your father, and you will find him safe and sound; go!”

The “little mason”  went off, turning round at every step. And in the meanwhile the crowd had begun to