Necessity is, indeed, the mother of invention. I was amused the other day in watching a boy who wanted to play see-saw and, in his failure to find another child to share the sport with him, had been driven back upon the ingenious resort of tying a number of bricks to one end of the plank to balance his weight at the other.
As a matter of fact, he just balanced against sixteen bricks, when these were fixed to the short end of plank, but if he fixed them to the long end of plank he only needed eleven as balance.
Now, what was that boy's weight, if a brick weighs equal to a three-quarter brick and three-quarters of a pound?
"A client of mine," said a lawyer, "was on the point of death when his wife was about to present him with a child. I drew up his will, in which he settled two-thirds of his estate upon his son (if it should happen to be a boy) and one-third on the mother. But if the child should be a girl, then two-thirds of the estate should go to the mother and one-third to the daughter. As a matter of fact, after his death twins were born—a boy and a girl. A very nice point then arose. How was the estate to be equitably divided among the three in the closest possible accordance with the spirit of the dead man's will?"