Page:De Amicis - Heart, translation Hapgood, 1922.djvu/298

266 The boy said, “Thank you,” without finding any other words, went out with his bag, and having taken leave of his little guide, he set out slowly and sadly in the direction of Boca, filled with amazement at the great and noisy town.

Everything that happened to him from that moment until the evening of that day ever afterwards lingered in his memory in a confused and uncertain form, like the wild vagaries of a person in a fever, so weary was he, so troubled, so despondent. And at nightfall on the following day, after having slept over night in a poor little chamber in a house in Boca, beside a harbor porter, after having passed nearly the whole of that day seated on a pile of beams, and, as in delirium, in sight of thousands of ships and boats and tugs, he found himself on the poop of a large sailing vessel, loaded with fruit, which was setting out for the town of Rosario, and was managed by three robust Genoese, who were bronzed by the sun; and their voices and the dialect which they spoke put a little comfort into his heart once more.

The voyage lasted three days and four nights, and it was a continual amazement to the little traveller. Three days and four nights on that wonderful river Parana, in comparison with which our great Po is but a rivulet; and the length of Italy quadrupled does not equal that of its course. The barge advanced slowly against this immeasurable mass of water. It threaded its way among long islands, once the haunts of serpents and tigers, covered with orange-trees and willows, like floating coppices. Now they passed through narrow canals, from which it seemed as though