janitress tells my mother everything. My sister Sylvia heard him screaming from the terrace one day, when his father had thrown him headlong downstairs, 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. 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 say, “I am hungry; my father does not give me anything to eat.”
His father sometimes comes for him, when he chances to be passing the schoolhouse,—pale, unsteady on his legs, with a fierce face, his hair over his eyes, and his cap awry; and the poor boy trembles all over when he catches sight of him in the street. But he immediately runs to meet him, with a smile; and his father does not appear to see him, but seems to be thinking of something else.
Poor Precossi! He mends his torn copy-books, borrows books to study his lessons, fastens the fragments of his shirt together with pins. It is pathetic to see him going through his gymnastics with those huge shoes in which he is fairly lost, in those trousers which drag on the ground, and that jacket which is too long, and those huge sleeves turned back to the very elbows. And he studies; he does his best; he would be one of the best, if he were able to work at home in peace. This morning he came to school with the marks of finger-nails on one cheek, and they all began to say to him.—
