The Boy's Ruined Copybook

A retelling based on The Chosen Highway by Lady Blomfield (George Ronald). The narrative is retold in our own words. Read the full text for the original account.

For two years, between 1854 and 1856, Bahá'u'lláh lived in the mountains of Kurdistán as a stranger. He had withdrawn from Baghdád to still the discord among the believers, and in that wild and lonely country no one knew who He was. He went in the simple garb of a dervish; the people of the region called Him only "the Nameless One," and marvelled at the wisdom and love of this quiet wanderer in their midst, never dreaming whose presence they were in.

One day, on a road near a mountain village, He came upon a boy crying.

He stopped and asked the child what was wrong. The boy poured out his small catastrophe: his schoolmaster had punished him for his poor handwriting and, as punishment, had destroyed his copybook — the practice-book in which a child laboriously copies out his letters. Now the boy was terrified to go back to school at all, for he had nothing to write in and nothing to show.

To the child it was the end of the world. And the Nameless One — who was, though the boy could not know it, the Bearer of a Revelation for all humankind — treated it as though nothing in that moment mattered more. He comforted the boy and told him to weep no more; He would set him a fresh writing-copy with His own hand, so the child would have his model of the letters again and need not face his teacher empty-handed.

There is something almost overwhelming in the smallness of it. The One whose pen would pour forth the verses of God for a new age bent down, in a mountain lane, to mend a single boy's broken copybook — to take up a pen not for kings or for scripture but simply to dry a child's tears and set him right with his schoolmaster.

It is a quiet picture of a truth that runs through His whole life: that no sorrow is too small for the attention of the greatest love, and that real tenderness does not wait for a worthy occasion. A frightened boy on a country road was occasion enough.

This account is retold for the Bahai Story Library; it is a paraphrase, not the original text. See The Chosen Highway (Lady Blomfield, George Ronald) for the complete account.

Blomfield, L.. (1940). *The Chosen Highway*. George Ronald. https://bahai-library.com/blomfield_chosen_highway