ways seems wrathful, I came very near replying to him, "I
salute you, sir," as to a man. I told my father afterwards, at home: "I
don't understand it; Stardi has no natural talent, he has not fine
manners, and his face is almost ridiculous; yet he suggests ideas to
me." And my father answered, "It is because he has character." And I
added, "During the hour that I spent with him he did not utter fifty
words, he did not show me a single plaything, he did not laugh once; yet
I liked to go there."

And my father answered, "That is because you esteem him."

THE SON OF THE BLACKSMITH-IRONMONGER.

Yes, but I also esteem Precossi; and to say that I esteem him is not
enough,--Precossi, the son of the blacksmith-ironmonger,--that thin
little fellow, who has kind, melancholy eyes and a frightened air; who
is so timid that he says to every one, "Excuse me"; who is always
sickly, and who, nevertheless, studies so much. His father returns home,
intoxicated with brandy, and beats him without the slightest reason in
the world, and flings his books and his copy-books in the air with a
backward turn of his hand; and he comes to school with the black and
blue marks on his face, and sometimes with his face all swollen, and his
eyes inflamed with much weeping. But never, never can he be made to
acknowledge that his father beats him.

"Your father has been beating you," his companions say to him; and he
instantly exclaims, "That is not true! it is not true!" for the sake of
not dishonoring his father.

"You did not burn this leaf," the teacher says to him, showing him his
work, half burned.

"Yes," he replies, in a trembling voice; "I let it fall on the fire."

But we know very well, nevertheless, that his drunken father overturned
the table and the light with a kick, while the boy was doing his work.
He lives in a garret of our house, on another staircase. The portress
tells my mother everything: my sister Silvia heard him screaming from
the terrace one day, when his father had sent him headlong down stairs,
because he had asked for a few soldi to buy a grammar. His father
drinks, but does not work, and his family suffers from hunger. How often
Precossi comes to school with an empty stomach and nibbles in secret at
a roll which Garrone has given him, or at an apple brought to him by the
schoolmistress with the red feather, who was his teacher in the first
lower class. But he never says, "I am hungry; my father does not give me
any