ow, 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 highw