"I can't come now," returned the dwarf. "I'm too busy counting the eighteenth star, but I'll drop my telescope and let you see me through that."
"I'll help you count the stars if you come," put in Jimmieboy. "How many stars can you count a day?"
"Oh, about one and a half," said the dwarf. "I could count more than that, only I'm cross-eyed and see double, so that after I've got through counting, I have to divide the whole number by two to get the proper figures, and I never was good at dividing. I've always hated division—particularly division of apples and peaches. There is no meaner sum in any arithmetic in the world than that I used to have to do every time I got an apple when I was your age."
"What was the sum?" asked Jimmieboy.
"It was to divide one apple by three boys," returned the queer little man. "Most generally that would be regarded as a case of three into one, but in this instance it was one into three; and, worse than all, while it pretended to be division, and was as hard as division, as far as I was concerned it was subtraction too, and I was always the leftest part of the remainder."
"But I don't see why you had to divide your apples every time you got any," said Jimmieboy.
"That's easy enough to explain," said the dwarf. "If I didn't divide, and did eat the whole apple, I'd have a fearful pain in my heart; whereas if I gave my little brothers each a third, it would often happen that they would get the pain and not I. After one or two experiments I fixed it so that I never got the pain part any more—for you know every apple has an ache in it—and they did, so, you see, I kept myself well as could be, and at the same time built up quite a reputation for generosity."
"How did you fix it so as to give them the pain part always?" queried Jimmieboy.
"Why, I located the part of the apple that held the pain. I did not divide one apple I got, but ate the whole thing myself, part by part. I studied each part carefully, and discovered that apples are divided by Nature into three parts, anyhow. Pleasure was one part, pain was another part, and the third part was just nothing—neither pleasure nor pain. The core is where the ache is, the crisp is where the pleasure is, and the skin represents the part which isn't anything. When I found that out I said, 'Here! What is a good enough plan for Nature is a good enough plan for me. I'll divide my apples on Nature's plan.' Which I did. To one brother I gave the core; to the other the skin; the rest I ate myself."
"It was very mean of you to make your brothers suffer the pain," said Jimmieboy.