“Oh, sure, I get you; but that’s only slang. You have been here long enough, I should guess from your talk, to get on to our American guff. Well, we’re glad to know you, Mr.——”
“Sabaste, but I best like—I prefer calling me Tony. It means in your language, I get on to it, as fine, grand, fat—no—but swell out—somebody much, eh?”
“It does, sure! I’ll introduce my partner, Augustus Grier; Gus for short, or he’ll get mad. They call me Bill Brown, generally forgetting the Brown, even here at school, where ’most everyone gets his last name. First names are more friendly.”
“I like it, too. In my native it is more mostly Signor, even to young—what you call it? Kids, as us, eh?” Tony smiled genially, his face lighting up most agreeably. “Some they call me ‘Wop,’ or ‘Sphagetti’.”
The boys learned that the intelligent young foreigner was in the graduating class which had escaped a lot of practical radio work; that he kept much to himself, either because of a real or fancied notion that social lines might be drawn against him, or because he was naturally unsocial. But after he began the making of a radio set and came in daily contact with Bill and Gus, the young Italian seemed to grow a little out of himself, becoming less reticent and secluded. The good fellowship of two lads a little younger than he, both giving him friendship and confidence, laughing at his errors of speech in perfect good nature and without ridicule, and at their own foibles as well, compelled the Italian boy to like the country of his adoption much better than he had before. This he expressed to Gus:
“You like me—no, I mean I you like. Yes, that is making to laugh, eh? Funny, very. Well, I mean to say it, you and Bill very much also. Why not? You love the live. You love the study. You make the happiness. You have the great—the large, eh? the big heart. All to you is nice and fine and it is equal to the doing, but you say it, it is worth the while. This makes good-will and kind thoughts to others, also by others—no; from others. You are like one dolce picture in my home. It is by two little birds fabricating their nest and all the time thus they are of song, singing, gay with living and working, helping so much always also to make all the country, this old world happy and satisfy—content. So, to my—to me, you are really it, eh? You are the real thing.”
“If Bill had heard you say all this, Tony, he’d declare you’re both an orator and a poet,” said Gus, laughing.
“And neither am I. But of my country there are many of such, and of learning also, science, the great learning. Many large men of the yesterday and many of the to-day also. In this work, too, the first, for is not Marconi——”
“Say that name to Bill and hear him shout some praises.”
“So? And will Bill speak good—noble—high of Signor Marconi? Then I, too, can speak noble of Signor Edison, the American. But what say now if I can tell it to you that my father, he is one sure and big friend of Signor Marconi. Our home, in Italia, what you call—the estate of us, it is not much a great distance from Signor Marconi of his estate. Often I have seen him. And so you understand?”