Page:De Amicis - Heart, translation Hapgood, 1922.djvu/38



November 1st.

Yesterday afternoon I went to the girls' school building, near ours, to give the story of the boy from Padua to Sylvia's teacher, who wished to read it. There are seven hundred girls there. Just as I arrived, they began to come out, all greatly rejoiced at the holiday of All Saints and All Souls; and here is a fine thing that I saw:

Opposite the door of the school, on the other side of the street, with his sack and scraper, stood a very small chimney-sweep, his face entirely black, with one arm resting against the wall, and his head supported on his arm, weeping and sobbing. Two or three of the girls of the second grade approached him and said, “What is the matter, that you weep like this?” But he made no reply, and went on crying.

“Come, tell us what is the matter with you and why you are crying,” the girls repeated. And then he raised his face from his arm—a baby face—and said through his tears that he had been to several houses to sweep the chimneys, and had earned thirty soldi, and that he had lost them, that they had slipped through a hole in his pocket,—and he showed the hole,—and he did not dare to return home without the money.

“The master will beat me,” he said, sobbing; and again dropped his head upon his arm, like one in despair. The children stood and stared at him very seriously. In the meantime, other girls, large and small, poor girls and girls of the upper classes, with