Page:De Amicis - Heart, translation Hapgood, 1922.djvu/350

316 through the windows at those beautiful trees which cast so deep a shade, where I should be so glad to run, and sadness and impatience overwhelm me at being obliged to go and shut myself up among the benches. But then I take courage at the sight of my kind mother, who is always watching me, when I return from school, to see whether I am not pale; and at every page of my work she says to me:—

“Do you still feel well?” and every morning at six, when she wakes me for my lesson, “Courage! there are only so many days more: then you will be free, and will get rested,—you will go to the shade of country lanes.”

Yes, she is perfectly right to remind me of the boys who are working in the fields in the full heat of the sun, or among the white sands of the river, which blind and scorch them, and those in the glass-factories, who stand all day long, motionless, with head bent over a flame of gas; and all of them rise earlier than we do, and have no vacations. Courage, then!

Even in this respect, Derossi is at the head of all, for he suffers neither from heat nor drowsiness; he is always wide awake, and cheery, with his golden curls, as he was in the winter, and he studies without effort, and keeps all about him alert, as though he freshened the air with his voice.

There are two others, also, who are always awake and attentive: stubborn Stardi, who pinches his face, to keep from going to sleep; and the more weary and heated he is, the more he sets his teeth, and he opens his eyes so wide that it seems as though he wanted to eat the teacher; and that trader of a Garoffi, who is