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The train ran through green fields and hedgerows in blossom, and the air we breathed was perfumed. My father was delighted, and every little while he would put his arm round my neck and talk to me like a friend, as he gazed out over the country. "Poor Crosetti!" he said; "he was the first man, after my father, to love me and do me good.
Six-ty ye-ars, you understand! And it is only two years since he stopped teaching school. Poor Crosetti! He lives an hour's journey from here by rail, at Condove, in the country of our old gardener's wife, of the town of Chieri." And he added, "Enrico, we will go and see him." And the whole evening he talked of nothing but him.
"Are you," asked my father, raising his hat, "Vincenzo Crosetti, the schoolmaster?" The old man raised his hat also, and replied: "I am," in a voice that was somewhat tremulous, but full. "Well, then," said my father, taking one of his hands, "permit one of your old scholars to shake your hand and to inquire how you are. I have come from Turin to see you." The old man stared at him in amazement.
Day before yesterday, at dinner, as my father was reading the newspaper, he suddenly uttered an exclamation of astonishment. Then he said: "And I thought him dead twenty years ago! Do you know that my old first elementary teacher, Vincenzo Crosetti, is eighty-four years old? I see here that the minister has conferred on him the medal of merit for sixty years of teaching.
However, you had good judgment; you were serious for your age. I remember the great affection of your mother for you. But it is very kind and polite of you to have come to seek me out. How could you leave your occupations, to come and see a poor old schoolmaster?" "Listen, Signor Crosetti," responded my father with vivacity. "I recollect the first time that my poor mother accompanied me to school.
The name of his primary teacher recalled to his mind a thousand things which had happened when he was a boy, his early companions, his dead mother. "Crosetti!" he exclaimed. "He was forty when I was with him. I seem to see him now. He was a small man, somewhat bent even then, with bright eyes, and always cleanly shaved.
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