TWELVE
Jan and the Magic Pencil
THERE was once a little boy called Jan, who lived in a country village. One day he had the good luck to be able to help a fairy out of a ditch, where she had got stuck in the mud.
The fairy was very grateful to Jan, and promised him, as a reward for his kindness, that he should have what he most wished for in the world.
Jan was not a very clever boy, and at first he couldn’t think of anything to wish for. His father was a farmer, and Jan had a good home and plenty to eat and drink; his only real trouble was that he was always at the bottom of his class at school. His father scolded and his mother wept, but Jan always stopped at the bottom. He wasn’t so bad at reading and writing, but he simply could not do arithmetic. His sums were always wrong, even the quite easy ones.
So when he had thought for a few minutes and the fairy was beginning to grow impatient, he decided that the best thing for him to wish for was that he might be able to get his sums right. The fairy accordingly gave him a magic slate pencil which possessed the power of being able to do any kind of arithmetic without ever making any mistake. You simply held it in your hand and it would write down the answer on your slate almost before you had time to read over the figures.
Jan was delighted with his present, which he put carefully away in his pencil-box. He could hardly believe that it would do such wonderful things; but, sure enough, he found he could do all his sums without the slightest effort, and that every one of them was right.
Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication—it made nothing of them all. Even those dreadful Long Division sums were no trouble to the magic pencil: it danced nimbly down the slate without stopping even for a second, and the answers were always right. Jan’s schoolmaster was astonished, so were his parents, and delighted too, when by the end of the week Jan had risen to the top of the school.
“What a good teacher I am, after all!” said the schoolmaster to himself. “I have even been able to teach arithmetic to a boy who was so hopelessly stupid over it that he couldn’t add up two and two correctly.”
He was so proud of this that he actually invited the principal people in the neighbourhood to come in and see his wonderful scholar.
And so it happened that the doctor, the lawyer, the priest, the mayor and one or two other important folk from round about arrived at the schoolhouse one fine day, all agog to see the schoolmaster’s wonderful pupil.