One lady suggested that the simplest way would be for her to take a
smaller share than the other two, because then the carpet need not be cut
into more than four pieces.

There are three easy ways of doing this, which I will leave the reader
for the present the amusement of finding for himself, merely saying that
if you suppose the carpet to be nine square feet, then one lady may take
a piece two feet square whole, another a two feet square in two pieces,
and the third a square foot whole.

But this generous offer would not for a moment be entertained by the
other two sisters, who insisted that the square carpet should be so cut
that each should get a square mat of exactly the same size.

Now, according to the best Western authorities, they would have found it
necessary to cut the carpet into seven pieces; but a correspondent in
Tokio assures me that the legend is that they did it in as few as six
pieces, and he wants to know whether such a thing is possible.

Yes; it can be done.

Can you cut out the six pieces that will form three square mats of equal
size?

85.--_Captain Longbow and the Bears._

That eminent and more or less veracious traveller Captain Longbow has a
great grievance with the public. He claims that during a recent
expedition in Arctic regions he actually reached the North Pole, but
cannot induce anybody to believe him. Of course, the difficulty in such
cases is to produce proof, but he avers that future travellers, when they
succeed in accomplishing the same feat, will find evidence on the spot.
He says that when he got there he saw a bear going round and round the
top of the pole (which he declares _is_ a pole), evidently perplexed by
the peculiar fact that no matter in what direction he looked it was
always due south. Captain Longbow put an end to the bear's meditations by
shooting him, and afterwards impaling him, in the manner shown in the
illustration, as the evidence for future travellers to which I have
alluded.

[Illustration]

When the Captain got one hundred miles south on his return journey he had
a little experience that is somewhat puzzling. He was surprised one
morning, on looking down from an elevation, to see no fewer than eleven
bears in his immediate vicinity. But what astonished him more than
anything else was the curious fact that they had so placed themselves
that there were seven rows of bears, with four bears in every row.
Whether or not this was the result of