Page:De Amicis - Heart, translation Hapgood, 1922.djvu/286

254 had straps of gold braid, and said, “Shake hands with Corporal Robbino.”

The corporal stopped, smiled, and offered me his hand; I shook it; he made a salute and withdrew.

“Do not forget it,” said my father; “for out of the thousands of hands which you will shake in the course of your life there will probably not be ten which possess the worth of his.”

Many years ago a Genoese lad of thirteen, the son of a workingman, went from Genoa to America all alone to seek his mother.

She had gone two years before to Buenos Ayres, a city, the capital of the Argentine Republic, to take service in a wealthy family, in order to earn in a short time enough to place her family once more in easy circumstances, they having fallen, through various misfortunes, into poverty and debt. There are courageous women—not a few—who take this long voyage with this object in view, and who, thanks to the large wages which people in service receive there, return home at the end of a few years with several thousand lire. The poor mother had wept bitterly at parting from her children,—the one aged eighteen, the other, eleven; but she had set out full of courage and hope.

The voyage was pleasant: and she had no sooner arrived at Buenos Ayres than she found, through a Genoese shopkeeper, a cousin of her husband, who had