MARCH
THE EVENING SCHOOL
LAST night my father took me to see the evening school in our Baretti schoolhouse, which was all lighted up, and where the workingmen were already beginning to enter. On our arrival we found the principal and the teachers very indignant, because a little while before the glass in one window had been broken by a stone. The beadle had darted forth and seized a boy, who was passing; but thereupon, Stardi, who lives in the house opposite, had come forward, and said:—
“This is not the right one; I saw it with my own eyes; it was Franti who threw it; and he said to me, ‘You'll catch it if you tell!’ but I am not afraid.”
The principal declared that Franti should be expelled for good.
In the meantime I was watching the workingmen enter by twos and threes; and more than two hundred had already entered. I have never seen anything so fine as the evening school. There were boys of twelve and upwards; bearded men who were on their way from their work, carrying their books and copy-books; carpenters, engineers with black faces, masons with hands white with plaster, bakers' boys with their hair full of flour. And one could smell varnish, hides, fish, oil,—odors of all the various trades. There also
