But now when ten, and half ten years
We man and wife have been,
Her age to mine exactly bears,
As eight is to sixteen;
Now tell, I pray, from what I’ve said,
What were our ages when we wed?
Ans.—Thy age, when marry’d, must have been
Just forty-five; thy wife’s fifteen.
Dillworth’s Schoolmaster’s Assistant, first published in London in 1774 and reprinted in Philadelphia in 1769, and considerably used in the colonies, contains two examples which the author called “Pleasant and Diverting Questions.” The first is as follows:
A farmer with a fox, a goose and a bag of corn has to cross a river in a boat so small that he can take only two of these three burdens with him at a time. How can he so handle matters that nothing will be destroyed, because he cannot leave the fox and the goose together, nor can he leave the goose and the corn.