Then, too, every person is liable to be overtaken by some great emergency which calls out all the capacities of his nature, and it is then that false teaching and training prove fatal, while he who has learned to develop the divine capacities within him comes off more than conqueror.

CHAPTER III.

A mathematical discussion.

The elder Ribsam took several puffs from his pipe, his eyes fixed dreamily on the fire, as though in deep meditation.  His wife sat in her chair on the other side, and was busy with her knitting, while perhaps her thoughts were wandering away to that loved Fatherland which she had left so many years before, never to see again.  Nellie had grown sleepy and gone to bed.

Mr. Ribsam turned his head and looked at Nick.  The boy was seated close to the lamp on the table, and the scratching of his pencil on his slate and his glances at the slip of paper lying on the stand, with the problems written upon it, told plainly enough what occupied his thoughts.

“Nicholas,” said the father.

“Just one minute, please,” replied the lad, glancing hastily up:  “I am on the last of the problems that Mr. Layton gave us for this week, and I have it almost finished.”

The protest of the boy was so respectful that the father resumed his smoking and waited until Nick laid his slate on the table and wheeled his chair around.

“There, father, I am through.”

“Read owed loud dot sum von you shoost don’t do.”

“Mr. Layton gave a dozen original problems as he called them, to our class to-day, and we have a week in which to solve them.  I like that kind of work, and so I kept at it this evening until I finished them all.”

“You vos sure dot you ain’t right, Nicholas, eh?”

“I have proved every one of them.  Oh, you asked me to read the last one!  When Mr. Layton read that we all laughed because it was so simple, but when you come to study it it isn’t so simple as you would think.  It is this:  If New York has fifty per cent. more population than Philadelphia, what per cent. has Philadelphia less than New York?”

Mr. Ribsam’s shoulders went up and down, and he shook like a bowl of jelly.  He seemed to be overcome by the simplicity of the problem over which his son had been racking his brains.

“Dot makes me laughs.  Yaw, yaw, yaw!”

“If you will sit down and figure on it you won’t laugh quite so hard,” said Nick, amused by the jollity of his father, which brought a smile to his mother; “what is your answer?”

“If I hafs feefty tollar more don you hafs, how mooch less tollar don’t you hafs don I hafs?  Yaw, yaw, yaw!”

“That is plain enough,” said Nick sturdily “but if you mean to say that the answer to the problem I gave you is fifty per cent., you are wrong.”

“Oxplains how dot ain’t,” said Mr. Ribsam, suddenly becoming serious.