IN AN ATTIC
Yesterday evening I went with my mother and my sister Sylvia, to carry the linen to the poor woman recommended by the newspaper. I carried the bundle; Sylvia had the paper with the initials of the name and the address. We went up to the very roof of a tall house, and through a long corridor with many doors. My mother knocked at the last; it was opened by a thin, fair woman who was still young, and it instantly struck me that I had seen her many times before, with that very same blue kerchief that she wore on her head.
“Are you the person of whom the newspaper says so and so?” asked my mother.
“Yes, signora, I am.”
“Well, we have brought you a little linen.”
The woman began to thank us and bless us, and could not make enough of it. Just then I noticed, in one corner of the bare, dark room, a boy kneeling in front of a chair, with his back turned towards us, who appeared to be writing; and he really was writing, with his paper on the chair and his inkstand on the floor. How did he manage to write in the dark? While I was saying this to myself, I suddenly recognized the red hair and the coarse jacket of Crossi, the son of the vegetable-peddler, the boy with the useless arm. I told this to my mother softly, while the woman was putting away the things.
“Hush!” replied my mother; “perhaps he will feel ashamed to see you giving alms to his mother: don't speak to him.”
But at that moment Crossi turned round; I was embarrassed; he smiled, and then my mother gave me a push, so that I should run to him and embrace him. I did so: he rose and took me by the hand.
“Here I am,” his mother was saying in the meantime to my mother, “alone with this boy, my husband in America these seven years, and I sick in addition, so that I can no longer make my rounds with my vegetables, and earn a few cents. We have not even a table left for my poor Luigino to do his work on. When there was a bench down at the door, he could, at least, write on the bench; but that has been taken away. He has not even light enough to study without ruining his eyes. And it is a mercy that I can send him to school, since the city provides him with books and copy-books. Poor Luigino, who would be so glad to study I Unhappy woman, that I am!”
My mother gave her all that she had in her purse, kissed the boy, and almost wept as we went out. And she had good cause to say to me: “Look at that poor boy; see how he is forced to work, when you have every comfort, and yet study seems hard to you! Ah, Enrico, there is more merit in the work which he does in one day, than in your work for a year. It is to such that the first prizes should be given!”