Nick did so, and on the last but one his parent tripped him.  A few pointed questions showed the boy that he was wrong.  Then the hearty “Yaw, yaw, yaw!” of the father rang out, and looking at the solemn visage of his wife, he asked: 

“Vy you don’t laughs now, eh?  Yaw, yaw, yaw!”

The wife meekly answered that she did not see anything to cause mirth, though Nick proved that he did.

Not only that, but the son became satisfied from the quickness with which his father detected his error, and the keen reasoning he gave, that he purposely went wrong on the first problem read to him with the object of testing the youngster.

Finally, he asked him whether such was not the case.  Many persons in the place of Mr. Ribsam would have been tempted to fib, because almost every one will admit any charge sooner than that of ignorance; but the Dutchman considered lying one of the meanest vices of which a man can be guilty.  Like all of his countrymen, he had received a good school education at home, besides which his mind possessed a natural mathematical bent.  He said he caught the answer to the question the minute it was asked him, and, although Mr. Layton may not have seen it before, Mr. Ribsam had met and conquered similar ones when he was a boy.

While he persistently refused to show Nick how to solve some of the intricate problems brought home, yet when the son, after hours of labor, was still all abroad, his father would ask him a question or two so skillfully framed that the bright boy was quick to detect their bearing on the subject over which he was puzzling his brain.  The parent’s query was like the lantern’s flash which shows the ladder for which a man is groping.

The task of the evening being finished, Mr. Ribsam tested his boy with a number of problems that were new to him.  Most of them were in the nature of puzzles, with a “catch” hidden somewhere.  Nick could not give the right answer in every instance, but he did so in a majority of cases; so often, indeed, that his father did a rare thing,—­he complimented his skill and ability.

CHAPTER IV.

Lost.

It was two miles from the home of Mr. Ribsam to the little stone school-house where his children were receiving their education.  A short distance from the dwelling a branch road turned off to the left, which, being followed nine miles or so, mostly through woods, brought one to the little country town of Dunbarton.

Between the home of Gustav Ribsam and the school-house were only two dwellings.  The first, on the left, belonged to Mr. Marston, whose land adjoined that of the Hollander, while the second was beyond the fork of the roads and was owned by Mr. Kilgore, who lived a long distance back from the highway.

Nick Ribsam, as he grew in years and strength, became more valuable to his father, who found it necessary, now and then, to keep him home from school.  This, however, did not happen frequently, for the parents were anxious that their children should receive a good school education, and Nick’s readiness enabled him to recover, very quickly, the ground thus lost.