Rico and Wiseli | Page 2

usually
followed by a little boy, who lingered on the threshold after his father
had gone on his way, and looked with his big black eyes for a long time
in the direction his father had taken; but where he was looking that no
one could have told, for his eyes had a faraway look, as if they saw
nothing that lay before them and near, but were searching for
something invisible to everybody.
On Sunday mornings, when the sun shone brightly, father and son
would saunter up the road together; and the close resemblance between
them was most striking, for the child was the man in miniature, only his
face was small and pale,--with his father's well-formed nose, to be sure;
but his mouth had an expression of great sadness, as if he could not
laugh. In his father's face this could not be detected, on account of the
beard.
When they walked along together, side by side, they did not talk; but
the father usually hummed a tune softly,--sometimes quite aloud,--and
the lad listened attentively. On rainy Sundays they sat at the window
together in the cottage, and seldom talked then; but the man drew his
harmonica from his pocket, and played one tune after another to the lad,
who listened most earnestly. Sometimes he would take a comb, or even
a leaf, and coax forth music; or he would shape a bit of wood with his
knife, and whistle a tune upon that. It really seemed as if there were no
object from which he could not draw forth sweet sounds. Once,

however, he brought a fiddle home with him, and the boy was so
delighted with the instrument, that he never forgot it. The man played
one tune after another, while the child listened and looked with all his
might; and when the fiddle was laid aside, the little fellow took it up,
and tried to find out for himself how the music was made. And it could
not have sounded so very badly, for his father had smiled, saying,
"Come, now!" and placed the big fingers of his left hand over his son's,
and held the little hand and the bow together in his right; and thus they
played for a long time, and produced a great many sweet tunes.
On the following day, after his father's departure, the boy tried again
and again to play, until at last he did succeed in producing a tune quite
correctly. Soon after, however, the fiddle disappeared, and never made
its appearance again.
Often, when they were together, the man would begin to sing
softly,--softly at first, then more and more distinctly as he became more
interested, and the boy know the words, he could at least follow the
tune. The father sang Italian always; and the child understood a great
deal, but not well enough to sing. One tune, however, he knew better
than any other, for his father had repeated it many hundred times. It
was part of a long song, and began in this wise:--
"One evening In Peschiera."
It was a sad melody that some one had arranged to a pretty ballad, and
it particularly pleased the lad, so that he always sang it with pleasure
and with a feeling of awe; and it sounded very sweetly, for the lad had
a clear, bell-like voice, that harmonized beautifully with his father's
strong basso. And each time after they had sung this song from
beginning to end, his father clapped the boy kindly on the shoulder,
saying, "Well done, Henrico! well done!" This was the way his father
called him, but he was called "Rico" only by everybody else.
There was a cousin who lived in the cottage with them, and who
mended and cooked and kept the house in order. In the winter she sat
by the stove and spun, and Rico had to consider how he could enter the
room, very carefully; for as soon as he had opened the door, his cousin
called out, "Do let that door alone, or we shall have it cold enough in
the room here."
In winter he was very often alone with his cousin; for when his father
had work to do in the valley, he would be away for long weeks at a

time.

CHAPTER II
.
IN THE SCHOOL.
Rico was almost nine years old, and had been to school for two winters.
Up there in the mountains there was no school in the summer-time; for
then the teacher had his field to cultivate, and his hay and wood to cut,
like everybody else, and nobody had time to think of going to school.
This was not a great sorrow for Rico,--he knew how to amuse himself.
When he had once taken his place in