Page:De Amicis - Heart, translation Hapgood, 1922.djvu/251

Rh Day before yesterday, at dinner, as my father was reading the newspaper, he suddenly gave an exclamation of surprise. 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. Sixty years, 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 to see him.”

He talked of nothing but him the whole evening. 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 shaven. Severe, but in a good way; for he loved us like a father, and forgave us more than one offence. He had risen from a peasant by virtue 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 know me. Never mind; I shall know him. Forty-four years have elapsed,—forty-four years, Enrico! and we will go to see him to-morrow.”

So yesterday morning, at nine o'clock, we were at the Susa railway station. I should have liked to have