Page:Ruth of the U.S.A. (IA ruthofusa00balm).pdf/33



HE man who had formed the small, distinct characters covering the paper of instructions had written in English; but while he was quite familiar with English script, it was evident that he had written with the deliberate pains of a person who realizes the need of differentiating his letters from the formation natural to him. That formation, clearly, was German script. Like everyone else, Ruth knew German families; and, like many other American girls who had been in high schools before the outbreak of the war, she had chosen German for a modern language course. Indeed, she had learned German well enough so that when confronted by the question on her War Registration card, What foreign languages do you read well? she had written, German.

She had no difficulty, therefore, in recognizing from the too broad tops of the a's, the too pointed c's and the loops which twice crossed the t's that the writer had been educated first to write German. He had failed nowhere to carefully and accurately write the English form of the letters for which the German form was very different, such as k and r and s; it was only in the characters where the two scripts were similar that his care had been less.