Ghulām Husain never spills his ink. Each boy has his own inkpot, which contains a tangled piece of silk soaked in ink. It dries up between the lessons, so when Ghulām Husain wants to write he moistens it with water so that the silk is thoroughly wet, but there is no water lying in the inkpot. In among this wet silk he dips his pen.
If you look into Ghulām Husain’s pen-box you will find pens cut to various breadths for large or small writing, a penknife, and a little slab to rest the pen-point on for the final cut; an inkpot, and a tiny brass ladle for adding water.
Many an English boy finds it tiresome to have to dot his i’s, but little Ghulām Husain has to dot almost every letter, some above the line and some below, some with one dot, some with two, and some with three. These dots are not round, but square, and the height of the letters is measured by the size of the dots. This letter must be one dot high, that letter two dots high, another three, and yet another five dots high. The size of the dot itself depends on the breadth of the pen.
As he learns to write better he will run his letters into curious combinations, and group his dots picturesquely in parts of the word to which they do not belong, or leave them out altogether, until at last, when he can write a really beautiful hand, the schoolmaster himself will not be able to read the letter without careful study, and may even have to guess at the meaning of particularly well-written passages.
One great beauty of a Persian letter is the way each line runs up at the end, making a pile of words, syllables, and even single letters, something in this style:--
rew s sc Persian way the “MY DEAR CHILDREN,--This is the ers. lett write en they up the ends of their lines wh f k o thin ey can words th They also use all the longest eir at th so th arly all els or ne and leave out all their vow ops.” no st they use ecially as read, esp letters are very hard to
The Persians do not apparently think much of their own system of education, for they are always laughing at their schoolmasters.
They have a story of a _chārvādār_, or muleteer, one of whose mules strayed one day into a school. It was quickly driven out, and the muleteer claimed damages from the schoolmaster to the extent of half the value of the mule. The schoolmaster indignantly asked on what he based his claim. The muleteer turned to the crowd which had gathered to listen to the argument. “My beast,” said he, “went into his school a mule and it has come out a donkey.” You see a donkey counts half a mule in caravan travelling, just as a child counts half a person in train travelling.