This, unfortunately enough, was no trifling deprivation.  Not that I longed especially for segments of Mrs. Surd’s justly celebrated lemon pies; not that the spheroidal damsons of her excellent preserving had any marked allurements; not even that I yearned to hear the Professor’s jocose table-talk about binomials, and chatty illustrations of abstruse paradoxes.  The explanation is far different.  Professor Surd had a daughter.  Twenty years before, he made a proposition of marriage to the present Mrs. S. He added a little Corollary to his proposition not long after.  The Corollary was a girl.

Abscissa Surd was as perfectly symmetrical as Giotto’s circle, and as pure, withal, as the mathematics her father taught.  It was just when spring was coming to extract the roots of frozen-up vegetation that I fell in love with the Corollary.  That she herself was not indifferent I soon had reason to regard as a self-evident truth.

The sagacious reader will already recognize nearly all the elements necessary to a well-ordered plot.  We have introduced a heroine, inferred a hero, and constructed a hostile parent after the most approved model.  A movement for the story, a Deus ex machina, is alone lacking.  With considerable satisfaction I can promise a perfect novelty in this line, a Deus ex machina never before offered to the public.

It would be discounting ordinary intelligence to say that I sought with unwearying assiduity to figure my way into the stern father’s good-will; that never did dullard apply himself to mathematics more patiently than I; that never did faithfulness achieve such meagre reward.  Then I engaged a private tutor.  His instructions met with no better success.

My tutor’s name was Jean Marie Rivarol.  He was a unique Alsatian—­though Gallic in name, thoroughly Teuton in nature; by birth a Frenchman, by education a German.  His age was thirty; his profession, omniscience; the wolf at his door, poverty; the skeleton in his closet, a consuming but unrequited passion.  The most recondite principles of practical science were his toys; the deepest intricacies of abstract science his diversions.  Problems which were foreordained mysteries to me were to him as clear as Tahoe water.  Perhaps this very fact will explain our lack of success in the relation of tutor and pupil; perhaps the failure is alone due to my own unmitigated stupidity.  Rivarol had hung about the skirts of the University for several years; supplying his few wants by writing for scientific journals, or by giving assistance to students who, like myself, were characterized by a plethora of purse and a paucity of ideas; cooking, studying and sleeping in his attic lodgings; and prosecuting queer experiments all by himself.

We were not long discovering that even this eccentric genius could not transplant brains into my deficient skull.  I gave over the struggle in despair.  An unhappy year dragged its slow length around.  A gloomy year it was, brightened only by occasional interviews with Abscissa, the Abbie of my thoughts and dreams.