Vanzetti lived with his parents, a brother, and two sisters until his fourteenth year. At school, loving study “with a real passion,” he won examination prizes that included a second prize in religious catechism. Under other circumstances the eager introspective boy might have developed into a teacher or scholar. William Thompson, who became Vanzetti’s counsel in 1924, thought he was one of the most gifted men he had known and—applying a Boston yardstick—felt that with an education he might have been a Harvard professor. Vanzetti’s father was a practical peasant-minded man. For some time he could not make up his mind whether to apprentice his son or to let him continue his studies. But when he read in the _Gazzetta del Popolo_ that forty-two Turin lawyers had applied for a position paying thirty-five lire a month, he decided then and there that education was a waste of money. _And so [Vanzetti wrote] in the year 1901 he conducted me to Signor Conino, who ran a pastry shop in the city of Cuneo, and left me there to taste for the first time, the flavor of hard, relentless labor. I worked for about twenty months there—from seven o’clock each morning until ten at night, every day, except for a three-hour vacation twice a month. From Cuneo I went to Cavour and found myself installed in the bakery of Signor Goitre, a place that I kept for three years. Conditions were no better than in Cuneo, except that the fortnightly free period was of five hours’ duration._ Later he became a caramel-maker in Turin. Scarcely out of his childhood, drifting from city to city, reading whatever came to hand, he found nothing to replace the memory of Villafalletto. His companions, the casual workers of the urban proletariat, were blasphemously Marxist, and he, still loyal to his heritage, would occasionally defend his religion with his fists. Yet, as the hard years of his adolescence passed, he too was drawn to the socialist image of a better world. His Catholicism eroded to a vague deism. Early in 1907, working again in Turin, he fell ill of pleurisy, and his father came from Villafalletto to take him home. In spite of his suffering, when he saw from the train the deep green of his native countryside Vanzetti felt renewed. _And so I returned after six years spent in the fetid atmosphere of bakeries and restaurant kitchens, with rarely a breath of God’s air or a glimpse of His glorious world. Six years that might have been beautiful to a boy avid of learning and thirsty for a refreshing draught of the simple country life of his native village. Years of the great miracle which transforms the child into the man. Ah, that I might have had the leisure to watch the wonderful unfoldment!_