The First Day of School

This is the first day of school. My three months spent in the country passed like a dream. This morning my mother took me to the Baretti school to have me entered for the third elementary grade. I was thinking of the country and went reluctantly. The streets were swarming with boys; the booksellers' shops crowded with fathers and mothers who were buying bags, portfolios, and copybooks; and so many people thronged in front of the school that a janitor and policeman had a very hard time keeping the entrance clear.

Near the door, some one touched me on the shoulder; it was my teacher of the second elementary. Always cheerful, he said:

"Well, Enrico, are we separated forever?"

I knew it too well, still those words pained me.

We made our way through the crowd with difficulty. Ladies, gentlemen, women of the middle class, workingmen, officers, grandmothers, servants, each leading a boy with one hand and holding the books of promotion with the other, were crowding the entrance and the stairway, making such a buzzing that it seemed like entering a theatre. I saw with pleasure the large hall on the ground floor with the doors of the seven class rooms where I had passed nearly every day for three years. There was a crowd of school mistresses coming and going. She who had taught me in the first upper class saluted me from the door of her room and said:

"Enrico, you go upstairs this year, I shall not even see you pass!" and looked at me with sadness. The principal had around him mothers in distress because there was no room for their children, and it seemed to me that his beard was a little whiter than it was last year. I also noticed that some of the boys had grown taller and stouter.

On the ground floor, where the divisions had already been made, there were children of the first and lowest grade who did not want to enter the class-room and who balked like donkeys; it was necessary to push them in; some escaped again from their benches; others, seeing their parents leave, commenced to cry, and the father or mother would return to offer consolation or take them home again, and the teachers were in despair.

My little brother was to enter the class of Mistress Delcati; I was put in that of Master Perboni up on the first floor.

At ten o'clock we were all in the class-room; fifty-four of us; only fifteen or sixteen of my class-mates of the second grade, among whom was Derossi, the one who always wins the first prize. The school-room seemed small and sad to me. I was thinking of the woods and mountains where I had spent the summer. I was also thinking of my teacher of the second class; he was so good and always laughed with us, and so small that he seemed like a companion, and I was sorry not to see him there with his bushy red hair. Our present teacher is tall, with long hair and no beard, and he has a straight wrinkle across his forehead. His voice is heavy and he looks at us fixedly, as though to read our inmost thoughts; I do not think he ever laughs. I was saying to myself: "This is the first day. Nine more months. How much work, how many monthly examinations, how much fatigue!" I felt the need of finding my mother at the close. I ran to her and kissed her hand. She said: "Courage, Enrico! we will study together," and I returned home happy. But I no longer have my master with his kind and cheerful smile, and the school does not seem so pleasant to me as it did last year.