out of a thousand readers who attempt
the solution not one will get it exactly right.

105.--_The Dorcas Society._

At the close of four and a half months' hard work, the ladies of a
certain Dorcas Society were so delighted with the completion of a
beautiful silk patchwork quilt for the dear curate that everybody kissed
everybody else, except, of course, the bashful young man himself, who
only kissed his sisters, whom he had called for, to escort home. There
were just a gross of osculations altogether. How much longer would the
ladies have taken over their needlework task if the sisters of the curate
referred to had played lawn tennis instead of attending the meetings? Of
course we must assume that the ladies attended regularly, and I am sure
that they all worked equally well. A mutual kiss here counts as two
osculations.

106.--_The Adventurous Snail._

[Illustration]

A simple version of the puzzle of the climbing snail is familiar to
everybody. We were all taught it in the nursery, and it was apparently
intended to inculcate the simple moral that we should never slip if we
can help it. This is the popular story. A snail crawls up a pole 12 feet
high, ascending 3 feet every day and slipping back 2 feet every night.
How long does it take to get to the top? Of course, we are expected to
say the answer is twelve days, because the creature makes an actual
advance of 1 foot in every twenty-four hours. But the modern infant in
arms is not taken in in this way. He says, correctly enough, that at the
end of the ninth day the snail is 3 feet from the top, and therefore
reaches the summit of its ambition on the tenth day, for it would cease
to slip when it had got to the top.

Let us, however, consider the original story. Once upon a time two
philosophers were walking in their garden, when one of them espied a
highly respectable member of the Helix Aspersa family, a pioneer in
mountaineering, in the act of making the perilous ascent of a wall 20
feet high. Judging by the trail, the gentleman calculated that the snail
ascended 3 feet each day, sleeping and slipping back 2 feet every night.

"Pray tell me," said the philosopher to his friend, who was in the same
line of business, "how long will it take Sir Snail to climb to the top of
the wall and descend the other side? The top of the wall, as you know,
has a sharp edge, so that when he gets there he will instantly begin to
descend, putting precisely the same