Then at last I began to see how long a road I had still to travel before I should reach the Promised Land of Literature; and, discouraged, I left my books and ran to play, never confessing my mistake which I vaguely felt had been ridiculous. But a few days later, I had a ray of comfort. The portergate-keeper, who had come to our house to fetch away a piece of furniture, caught sight of a book lying on one of the tables and pronounced its title aloud, to show me that he knew how to read. But what he said was Opere Schelte. I corrected him: he accepted my arguments and thanked me. This afforded a balm to my vanity and enabled me to hold my head erect once more and return with confidence to my "studies." My studies were interrupted by a long journey;-a journey which remains in my memory like a splendid vision. I went with my mother to Valenza where one of my sisters had exalted me to the premature dignity of uncle. I preserve from the journey a confused picture of unknown villages framed by the windows of the car or the diligence. There are great empty spaces of time and place which I fancy correspond to certain long and mysterious intervals of somnolence, and between these various details of no earthly importance, stand out with startling clearness. It may be a cat I saw on a roof as we passed or a bit of red cloth fluttering from a window, or the mere movement of the shadows of unseen men, and the distant sound of unknown bells, of which the recollection still renews in me the feeling I then experienced of being very, very far from my home and my school. One of my clearest memories is that of the eager curiosity with which I gazed about me when we left the train at the station of Alessandria. I fully expected 1 Instead of Opere Scelte-Selections. LIVING AGE. VOL. XVII. 882 to see on the horizon a sort of Great Wall of China, an enormous, intricate mass of bastions and machicofated towers, which would stand out against the sky like an Alpine range, and display the mouths of a thousand cannon and the bayonets of a whole army of sentinels. I believe that my mania for wandering up and down the earth took its origin in the extraordinary hitherto unknown experiences of that journey. I remember how, from first to last, my mother was every moment compelled to restrain my impatience, clutch me by the arm when I sprang to the window and hint that I should lower my voice, when I shrilly proclaimed my opinions to the amusement of our fellow-travellers. And it is not only the pleasure I then experienced which has led me to believe that no money is more judiciously expended by parents on the education of their children than that spent on their travels, but still more because I remember perfectly (and my people have corroborated the fact) the great impetus which that short journey gave my intelligence, so that, when I was back in school again, I gained more in one month than I had done before in several. And in the same way ever since, after every journey I have been conscious of a re-enforcement of all my mental faculties, a repetition of that experience not infrequent in youth when we recur to the thought of what we were but a short time before, with a feeling almost of compassion for a being so obviously our inferior,-whom we have left so very far behind. ance of one of the boys made my way fashions of that day, which seem to me to have been much better adapted to to a ground floor room, where lay the body with uncovered head. That white the cerebral capacity of the average immovable face, whose glassy eyes child than those of the present time. It was toward the end of the second year glared with an expression of superhuman amazement, made upon me so pro- that I began to read and understand certain books. The first deep emotion found an impression of terror and which came to me from my reading dread that during the whole school session I understood nothing of what was that aroused in me by a certain went on about me, and when I was chapter of a good little book called Giannetto, in which the small protagohome again, I forced down my food in silence, in dread of discovery should I nist, who has run away from home, finds himself, after various adventures, fail to eat. But ever before my eyes was the vivid image of that face,-sol- alone in the fields when night comes on, is overwhelmed by fear and repentemn, mysterious, terrible, like that of ance and finally discovered by his a spectre which rose from the earth I remember turned wherever I My people and taken home. my gaze. that I trembled and wept as I read, mother perceived my state of mind and then closing the book, went and and finally by her inquiries succeeded in drawing the truth out of me. She twined my arms about my mother's reproved the curiosity which had led neck, vowing that never, never would me to seek such a sight; but presently I risk the perils of so tremendous an adventure. But a child's mind is a her talk took another turn and' she becurious thing, which can receive in gan to enlist my pity for the poor boy, dead in an Asylum, with no father or quick succession equally strong impressions of a diametrically opposite namother and perhaps with no memory ture, and marvellous is the power of of either, with no loving care, no one all fiction over the childish imaginato be sorry he was dead, who would tion! The second book I read was the be buried with no flowers on his coffin and be forgotten by all. These words Life of a Bandit, an old book that I routed out of the depths of our library roused in my heart a feeling of comat home, and which afterwards disappassion and tenderness, which if it did miti- peared to my great regret. For a hunnot utterly obliterate at least dred times, in later days, the impulse gated my horror and covered it as with seized me to re-read it, because of the a veil; diverting my thoughts to another channel. The white face now deep impression it had made on me as me with a child. I do not remember to what wore another aspect, filled grief rather than terror and was, as it country or what century belonged this were, idealized by the aureole of mis- gallows-bird, who roved o'er mountain and forest, robbing and garrotting, and fortune. But all that day I avoided who, by means of his marvellous stratbeing alone, and when night came I egy, always came off victorious from wanted my mother to stay beside me his conflicts with our brave soldiery. I till I fell asleep, repeating to me those words of love and pity which had only remember that I conceived a passionate devotion for this hero; that his softened the stark phantasm of death wild and wandering existence seemed and hidden it from my eyes. to me so absolutely blissful that I secretly formed the plan of "taking to the road" as soon as I should be old that this dream SO enough, and I was kept for nearly two years at that school, which I rather enjoyed, thanks to the good sense of the master and thanks as well to the pedagogic wrought upon me that from my chamber window I used to scour the coun⚫ tryside with my gaze, determining the direction of my flight and deciding which of those lofty mountain-heights should be the scene of my first brigand bivouac, and, perchance, of my first encounter with the state authorities. Ah, how great would have been the anguish of the author of Giannetto, could he only have read my thoughts. But at the very height of my criminal enthusiasm, there befel me an adventure which caused me utterly to renounce the noble career of which I had dreamed. We had at home an old yellow cat of which I was extremely fond and which used to go to sleep every evening upon my lap. One day I took a notion to put him in a leash like a dog and take him to walk. So I tied a cord about his neck, taking care to make a solid knot, which could not slip. or be uncomfortable. But hardly was the knot tied when the cat got away from me and I did not catch a glimpse of him again all day. Next morning, as I played in the garden, I saw his back among the branches of a tree. He looked as though he were crouching, ready to spring on a bird. I called him, he never moved. I crept under the tree where I could see his face, and a shudder ran through me, for he was dead. As he had made his way among the branches the cord had twisted round and round his neck like a serpent and strangled him. Filled with grief and terror, I rushed to my mother and confessed my crime, weeping and imploring her not to tell my father, with whom the cat was a great pet. My mother forgave me and promised to say nothing. The cat was buried in secret and I was betrayed by no one. But it was a terrible moment when my father suddenly broke out at table "What's become of the yellow pussy? We never see it now-a-days." No more terrible to the first fratricide can have been the divine words, "Where is Cain thy brother?" My conscience proclaimed me an assassin and I could not endure my father's gaze, which seemed to me to read my inmost heart. I pretended to feel sick so as to escape from table, and shutting myself in my chamber flung myself on the bed, a prey to anguish and remorse. The Life of a Bandit lay on the light-stand, and at the sight of the book a wholesome thought occurred to namely, whether my faintheartedness me:-a doubt, would ever permit of my devoting myself to the poetic profession which I had chosen. I meditated long upon this problem. And my final conclusion was as follows:-"No. You, who have been so tremendously overcome by the death of a cat, which you did not kill with your own hands, would never have courage to murder carabinieri.” The words in which this thought expressed itself were more tender of my self-love than these, but such was its purport. And from that moment I renounced the career of a brigand and became once more Giannetto. It was on an evening of the same year that my kind father, still unconscious of the tragedy of the cord, took me for the first time to the theatre, where a poor company was giving Molière's Tartuffe-I forestall the objections of the scrupulous. The comedy did no harm whatever to my infantile purity, because I did not understand it in the very least. One only phrase aroused my attention when Tartuffe, twisting his neck and clasping his hands, said to the lady, "You wield your own weapons." All the theatre broke into a laugh, for which I could see no reason, since the actress appeared to have about her neither daggers nor pistols, and I asked my father, "What weapons?" He smiled, pulled his moustache through his fingers and after a brief hesitation replied,-"By weapons in this case are meant beauty, grace,-attractive manners-" I was not much the wiser for his answer. But the theatre seemed to me a scene of enchantment, with its triple tier of boxes, the chandelier, the foot-lights and above all the drop-curtain, which represented a popular revolt against a feudal Baron of the Middle Ages. The comedy appeared to me a mere accessory to these marvels, and as we came out, I made my father laugh by the enthusiasm with which I exclaimed, "Oh, what a good time I've had!" My kind father! Though denying himself many things, he supplied us with amusements of every kind, and when my mother called his attention to the expense, he used to answer, "Oh, poor children! Let us make their lives as pleasant as we can. Who knows what the future has in store for them? Let them at least have happy memories of their childhood." But all that year every pleasure which came to me from my father was troubled by the image of the poor micio who by his tragic end had recalled me from a course of crime and blood. III. QUI, QUAE, QUOD. I was only seven when I began Latin in the public school:-in Prima Grammatica as the most elementary course in the Gymnasium was then called. I was too young; and I hereby take issue with all those fathers who are insane enough to spur their boys on through the school-grades by leaps and bounds. As if true success in this world were not dependent upon a number of incalculable and inevitable accidents, both external and internal-far more influential than the dubious advantage of having finished one's secondary schooling a year or two in advance of others. My father was no victim to this mania. He only wanted to try an experiment and the experiment had to be aban doned. Nor can I affirm that it did me any great harm, though my unripe age made those first three years of Latin, albeit the language was somewhat less difficult to me then than now!-a needless martyrdom. I thought it like a barrack when I first entered it-that big schoolroom packed with boys, many of whom were three or four years older than I, and looked to me like men: while the teacher's desk, of pulpit shape, and towering above the benches like a feudal castle above the huts of its dependent village, aroused in me feelings of reverence and awe. The professor was a man of about forty, of grave and aristocratic physiognomy, always wrapped in a great gray frock-coat, with something of the air of an unfrocked priest, who used to make us say a prayer in unison at the beginning and end of every lesson, and even,though the Statute had been in force six years!-between the different declensions. He had a heavy hand which often fell upon his pupils but, as in the case of my first master, more often upon the ill than the well-dressed. Save for his penchant for beating, he was a good fellow and had a good method of instruction, but it was beyond his power to make the stomach of seven and a half digest Latin. That whole year is to me a confused memory of thankless toil, of troubled dreams and tears. My single cheerful recollection is of the professor's birthday, which it was then the fashion to celebrate in all the secondary schools by a joint present for which the pupils began their preparations a whole fortnight in advance. That year the gift was made in a most absurd fashion which is worth describing, as illustrating the scholastic fashions of the day. We each subscribed thirty cents and bought a pan di Spagna, I don't know how many bottles of Barolo, and a great bouquet of flowers. At our last meeting-held on the street-our collector-general, the son of a tavern keeper, announced to us that eight cents of our funds were still on hand, and what was to be done with them? The opinions were many and the discussion long. Finally we accepted by a unanimous vote the luminous suggestion of our apothecary's boy, who remembering that the professor had a cough of ten days' standing, proposed that we should complete our gift by eight cents' worth of gum-arabic. The testimonial was presented by the school en masse, after having been carried through the streets in broad daylight-coram populo, like the Sacrament. At the head of the procession went the Pan di Spagna, borne uncovered by the tallest boy in the class; then came a boy with the bouquet raised aloft like one of the Pope's peacock fans, then eight or ten more boys, each with a bottle in his hand; and finally the gum-bearer, with a noisy following. As we paraded the principal streets, people paused to look at us, remarking aloud "Those are the scholars of Prima Grammatica, taking a birthday-present to Professor So-andSo." It was a silly performance, and the thing is much more discreetly managed now-a-days. A few individuals are selected, from the fathers, rather Nuova Antologia. All than the sons, and political soft-sawder has taken the place of gum-arabic. But the best remains to be told. The scene of the presentation itself was touching. The professor's wife was there. our offerings had been made, the professor had delivered his little speech in which he exhorted us to display our affection for him by application to our books rather than by bottles of Barolo and we were on the point of departure, when the "gum-bearer" who had forgotten to offer his gift, made his way to the fore, and handing out the package as it had been the key of a city, said with solemnity "Signor professore, there is this, too." Then perceiving that he was not understood, he added in all seriousness, "For your cough, signor professore!" Oh, it was an occasion! And for several days thereafter I remember that our Latin was less of a burden, and that the distribution of blows was entirely suspended. But pan di Spagna cannot accomplish all things. The next week qui, quae, quod was upon us again, with all the harshness of the old régime. It began once more to rain cuffings and impositions, and the apothecary lad was forced to admit that even gum-arabic will not avail to alter the course of human affairs. (To be continued). A MATTER OF ART. In Treporth, Art was spelt with a very large capital letter. Not that the Treporthians loved Art for Art's sake. The case, indeed, was quite the contrary, for the fisherfolk constituting Treporth's aboriginal community regarded with carefully disguised scorn the painters who paid them good coin of the realm to act as models, the visi tors who came from afar in search of literary material, and the tourists who, following in the train of the others, ransacked the picturesque tumble-down houses of the little town in search of "bits" of old furniture, crockery, and curios. From the material side, however, Treporth quite saw how Art was money |