Varieties of Disturbance Read Online Free PDF Page A

by the roots of the large trees. Stephen himself, along with his neighbors Carol and Jonathan, lived one street over from the school. At the corner of the street on which the school stood was a small store owned and presided over by a matronly woman with a rather forbidding manner. It sold candy and a limited range of groceries, and was heavily patronized by the children after school. Across from this store, a street descended steeply toward a broad, shallow river in which the children were not allowed to swim because of effluents from the factories upstream. The school building was surrounded by a large asphalt playground lacking climbing or swinging equipment. The classrooms were well lighted, with natural daylight coming in through large windows.
    General Appearance and Form of the Letters
    The letters are written on lined exercise paper of two different sizes, most of them on the smaller, 7? by 8 ½?, four of them on the larger, 8? by 10 ½?. Although the paper is of a low grade and was manufactured nearly sixty years ago, it has remained supple and smooth in texture, and the letters are still clearly legible, some students in particular having borne down heavily to make very dark and distinct lines. They are all written in ink, though the ink varies, some blue and some black, some dark and some light, some lines thin and some thick.
    The penmanship is for the most part quite good, i.e., the script slopes at a fairly consistent angle to the right, most letters touch the line, the letters are evenly spaced, the uprights of the letters do not touch the line above, etc., though the variations in thickness of line and formation of letters, as well as the wavering lines, betray the tremulous hands and labored efforts of the novice script-users. Some of the capitals, however, are very elegantly formed, with a handsome flourish.
    There are twenty-seven letters altogether, written by thirteen girls and fourteen boys. Twenty-four of the children’s letters are dated January 4, evidently the day on which the teacher set them to work as a group; two are dated January 5, and one January 8, implying that these children were absent on the day the exercise was initiated.
    The letters all carry the same heading, obviously prescribed by the teacher, on three lines in the upper-right-hand corner: the name of the school; the town and state; and the date. They are ruled by hand in pencil down the left margin to provide a uniform indented guide for the beginning of each line, with the exception of the January 8 letter—this latecomer evidently was not given the instruction or did not hear it—and those written on the larger sheets of paper, which bear a printed rule down the left margin. The hand-ruled lines vary: some are thin and straight, others thick and slanted, and one trails off at an angle at the bottom, the pupil having evidently reached the end of his ruler before he reached the bottom of the page.
    The salutations are all the same: “Dear Stephen.” The closings vary within a narrow range: “Your friend” (5 boys and 10 girls); “Your classmate” (3 girls and 2 boys); “Your pal” (4 boys); “Sincerely yours” (1 boy); “Love” (1 boy); and “Your pal of pals” (1 boy: this was Jonathan, a close friend). It should be noted that only the boys use the colloquial “pal,” whereas nearly twice as many girls as boys use the more formal “friend.”
    The teacher has inked in corrections on some of the letters, in the darkest ink and a smaller hand. She has added commas where missing (most frequently after the salutation, “Dear Stephen,” the closing, e.g. “Your friend,” and between the name of the town and the state) and question marks where required. She has corrected some misspellings (“happey,” “sleding,” “throught,” “brouther,” and “We are mississ you very much”). In one case she