The Weeping Schoolboy

One day walking down the mountain, Bahá’u’lláh heard the sound of crying, and there was a little boy, why was he weeping so bitterly? “Oh Sir! The schoolmaster has punished me for writing so badly! And now I have nothing to copy, and I cannot write and I dare not go back to school!” Bahá’u’lláh sat with the boy, wrote him a copy and tenderly taught him how to imitate it. The little boy ran off greatly excited and pushed the writing into the hands of the schoolmaster. When the schoolmaster saw the writing he was astonished. “From whence did you get this?” he asked in amazement. “He wrote it for me, the dervish on the mountain,” the boy replied. “But this is exquisite penmanship! He is no dervish who wrote this, but a royal personage!” And so it was that the people heard this story and became curious about the dervish, alone on the mountains. And the Sufis there sought Him out and asked Him many difficult questions, and He answered them all, and their love and respect for ‘the Nameless One’ knew no bounds.

Source: retold in Ruhi Book 4, from the recollections of Bahíyyih Khánum in Lady Blomfield, The Chosen Highway, Part II, “A Spoken Chronicle”.

Collected from bahaistories.com (Subject: deeds-not-words).

Various. *bahaistories.com archive*. https://bahaistories.com/subject/deeds-not-words