Page:De Amicis - Heart, translation Hapgood, 1922.djvu/89

 and her red feather. She is also the girls' drawing-teacher, and she supports her mother and a brother by her earnings.

Sunday, 18th.

The grandnephew of the old employee who was struck in the eye by Garoffi's snowball is in the room of the schoolmistress who has the red feather: we saw him to-day with his uncle, who treats him like a son. I had finished writing out the monthly story for the coming week,—The Little Florentine Scribe,—which the master had given to me to copy; and my father said to me:—

“Let us go up to the fourth floor, and see how that old gentleman's eye is.”

We entered a room which was almost dark, where the old man was sitting up in bed, with a great many pillows behind his shoulders; by the bedside sat his wife, and in one corner his nephew was amusing himself. The old man's eye was bandaged. He was very glad to see my father; he made us sit down, and said that he was better, that his eye was not only not ruined, but that he should be quite well again in a few days.

“It was an accident,” he added. “I regret the terror which it must have caused that poor boy.” Then he talked to us about the doctor, whom he expected every moment to attend him. Just then the door-bell rang.

“There is the doctor,” said his wife.

The door opened—and whom did I see? Garoffi,