The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti: A New England Legend Read Online Free PDF

are to your father’s soul. If I cannot succeed in doing that, I know that you will save this letter and read it over in future years to come and you will see and feel the same heart-beat affection as your father feels in writing to you.”
    â€œIt was the greatest treasure and sweetness in my struggling life that I could have lived with you and your brother Dante and your mother in a neat little farm, and learn all your sincere words and tender affection. Then in the summer-time to be sitting with you in the home nest under the oak tree shade—beginning to teach you of life and how to read and write, to see you running, laughing, crying and singing through the verdant fields picking the wild flowers here and there from one tree to another, and from the clear, vivid stream to your mother’s embrace.”
    â€œI know that you are good and surely you love your mother, Dante, and all the beloved ones—and I am sure that you love me also a little, for I love you much and then so much. You do not know, Ines, how often I think of you every day. You are in my heart, in my vision, in every angle of this sad walled cell, in the sky and everywhere my gaze rests.
    â€œMeantime, give my best paternal greetings to all the friends and comrades, and doubly so to our beloved ones. Love and kisses to your brother and mother.”
    â€œWith the most affectionate kiss and ineffable caress from him who loves you so much that he constantly thinks of you. Best warm greetings from Bartolo to you all.
    Your Father”
    While he talked to her, she closed her eyes and tried to see his face and the motion of his lips, and the twinkle that had sometimes appeared in his eyes even when she saw him in prison.
    That, however, was in the past. By the calendar of grown-up people, it was only a few days in the past, but by this little girl’s own passage of time and her own calculations for estimating the passage of time, it was a long, long while in the past. Now on this morning, she slept peacefully and gently with the dreams, with the memories, bitter or sweet.
    â€œPlease go away,” the mother pleaded with the reporter.
    The young man looked at the two children again, and then he left. He was not able to remain any longer. He left, and walked away down the road and tried to compose in his mind the little bit that he had seen in such a manner that it would make a story. He was plagued and troubled by many, many things that had come into his consciousness all of a sudden and that were in large measure beyond his understanding.
    Never before had he felt the necessity to comprehend what motivated a poor fish peddler and a hard-working shoemaker who were both of them anarchists or communists or something of the sort. Such people came from elsewhere into the edge of his world. They embarked upon motion, and that motion might end in violent death or prison or starvation or the electric chair; but such an ending was expressly reserved for such people. It was no part of his own world and no business of his conscience.
    Now it had abruptly become a part of his world and the business of his conscience. He had once taken a girl on a date and boyishly boasted to her of the many experiences that a newspaper man had. This was without question such an experience as he had boasted of. Would he ever tell this experience to anyone in such a boastful, boyish way, he wondered? Certainly, if he could tell it to anyone, then he could make a story of it as he now had to.
    But what would the story be? He sensed somehow vaguely and to a degree tragically, that a story beyond any he had ever discovered or told, lay in the tranquil and beautiful faces of the sleeping children. His education told him that “Dante” was the name of an Italian poet, even though he had never read Dante the poet. But he wondered how the Italian shoemaker had come to name his little girl Ines. Such wondering was replaced by the realization that this child