The Copybook Complaint

a schoolmaster's circular letter, eastern steadings

A peevish letter from an eastern-Vale hedge-schoolmaster to the parents of his pupils, begging them to stop the children scratching 'the same silly unfinished mark' on every slate, wall, and frozen puddle — a fad, he is sure, that one wicked clever child started and the rest have aped. He is wrong about where it started.

Good folk of the upper steadings —

I must ask your help with a nonsense that has taken the little ones. For a season now they will draw a certain figure — you will have seen it, scratched on the byre door, traced in the hearth-ash, gouged into the ice on the water-butt. A cornered sort of shape, all straight lines and angles, and always — this is the part they will not be argued out of — with one line left off, unfinished, though they draw the rest exact as a mason. Ask them what it is and they cannot say. Ask them who taught it and they blame each other. Tell them to stop and they weep and swear their hands do it while they think of other things.

I have strapped young Sela Othrenni's slate away twice, for the others copy her worst of all, and I'll own the marks have a queer catching quality — I found the figure on my OWN wall this morning and cannot for my life say when I drew it. But it is a fad, no more, the sort of foolishness children pass round like a cough, and it will pass the same way if we are firm. Do not, I beg you, encourage the Soft Choir's soft talk of touched children and omens. It is chalk and idleness. Take the chalk away.

— Master Bendrel, who would like his pupils to attend to their letters and not their scribbling