The puzzle in this case is simply to take your pencil and, starting from one black star, strike out all the stars in twelve straight strokes, ending at the other black star.  It will be seen that the attempt shown in the illustration requires fifteen strokes.  Can you do it in twelve?  Every turning must be made on a star, and the lines must be parallel to the sides and diagonals of the square, as shown.  In this case we are dealing with a chessboard of reduced dimensions, but only queen moves (without going outside the boundary as in the last case) are required.

333.—­THE QUEEN’S JOURNEY.

[Illustration]

Place the queen on her own square, as shown in the illustration, and then try to discover the greatest distance that she can travel over the board in five queen’s moves without passing over any square a second time.  Mark the queen’s path on the board, and note carefully also that she must never cross her own track.  It seems simple enough, but the reader may find that he has tripped.

334.—­ST. GEORGE AND THE DRAGON.

[Illustration]

Here is a little puzzle on a reduced chessboard of forty-nine squares.  St. George wishes to kill the dragon.  Killing dragons was a well-known pastime of his, and, being a knight, it was only natural that he should desire to perform the feat in a series of knight’s moves.  Can you show how, starting from that central square, he may visit once, and only once, every square of the board in a chain of chess knight’s moves, and end by capturing the dragon on his last move?  Of course a variety of different ways are open to him, so try to discover a route that forms some pretty design when you have marked each successive leap by a straight line from square to square.

335.—­FARMER LAWRENCE’S CORNFIELDS.

One of the most beautiful districts within easy distance of London for a summer ramble is that part of Buckinghamshire known as the Valley of the Chess—­at least, it was a few years ago, before it was discovered by the speculative builder.  At the beginning of the present century there lived, not far from Latimers, a worthy but eccentric farmer named Lawrence.  One of his queer notions was that every person who lived near the banks of the river Chess ought to be in some way acquainted with the noble game of the same name, and in order to impress this fact on his men and his neighbours he adopted at times strange terminology.  For example, when one of his ewes presented him with a lamb, he would say that it had “queened a pawn”; when he put up a new barn against the highway, he called it “castling on the king’s side”; and when he sent a man with a gun to keep his neighbour’s birds off his fields, he spoke of it as “attacking his opponent’s rooks.”  Everybody in the neighbourhood used to be amused at Farmer Lawrence’s little jokes, and one boy (the wag of the village) who got his ears pulled by the old gentleman for stealing his “chestnuts” went so far as to call him “a silly old chess-protector!”