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Pinocchio Starts for School

it be cloth? Silk? It shall be a suit of gold, lined with silver and fastened with diamond buttons. The poor man really deserves it, because in order to buy me an ABC book so I could go to school, he is now in his shirt sleeves, and in the cold weather too! There are not many fathers who would sacrifice so much."

While he was talking this way to himself he thought he heard the music of a fife and the beating of a drum, —pi-pi-pi, pi-pi-pi, zum, zum, zum. He stopped to listen. The sounds came from the end of a long street that led to the sea. "What is that beautiful music? It is too bad that I have to go to school. If—" And he stopped and stood there, irresolute. He must decide now whether to go to school or to listen to the fife and drum. "Today I will go and hear the fife and drum," the little rascal decided at