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COLLEGE FRIENDS[1]
by edmondo de amicis
I.
THERE are many who write down every evening what they have done during the day; some who keep a record of the plays they have seen, the books they have read, the cigars they have smoked—but is there one man in a hundred, nay, in a thousand, who, at the end of the year, or even once in a lifetime, draws up a list of the people he has known? I don't mean his intimate friends, of course the few whom he sees, or with whom he corresponds; but the multitude of people met in the past, and perhaps never to be encountered again, of whom the recollection returns from time to time at longer and longer
- ↑ Although "College Friends" is rather a reverie than in any strict sense a story (something in the spirit of "The Reveries of a Bachelor," if an analogy may be sought in another literature), it has been thought best to include it here as one of the best-known of De Amicis' shorter writings. Indeed it is the leading piece in his chief volume of "Novelle," so that he has himself included it with his tales.
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