"No," the boy said, "I got the other wrong somewhere."
"S'posin' you had him right," the puzzle-maker said, "it took you hour. Ordinary figures you did him in thirty-two seconds."
"I see," said Eric, "it's another case of wonderful but not wonderful enough, isn't it?"
"Exactly. Here," the other continued, reaching down a manuscript portfolio, "is every kind of numbers ever made. You find that the Hindu—or wrongly called Arabic—numerals are the only ones wonderful enough for modern uses."
Thoroughly interested, the boy sat down with this big manuscript book. Weird schemes of numeration rioted over the pages, from the Zuni finger and the Chinese knuckle systems to the latest groups of symbols, used in modern higher mathematics, of which the boy had not even heard. It was noon before he realized with a start that the morning was gone.
"Oh, Dan!" he said reproachfully, "we haven't done anything to-day."
"Never mind," said the old man, "we get a start after a while."
That afternoon, when the boy settled down to do some work on his own account, he felt a much greater friendliness to the mere look of figures. They seemed like old friends. Before, a figure had only been something in a "sum," but now he felt that each one had a long history of its own. Little did he realize that the biggest step of his mathematics was accomplished. Never again would he be able to look at a page of figures with revulsion. They had come to life for him.
The next morning, Eric found the old puzzle-maker busy with a chess-board.
"Aren't we going to do any work to-day, either?" he asked, disappointedly.