Page:Cornelia Meigs--The Pool of Stars.djvu/98

 equal to three other pyramids,' I can get that far and I can even understand the first one, but the second is almost too much for me, and the third is quite impossible."

"And I," returned Betsey gravely, "if I can once get the first one, I can go on to the end. It is just at the beginning that I always come to grief."

"Perhaps you could help me and I could help you," David suggested excitedly. "I would sleep easier at night if I could once get those three pyramids into my head. I have my book in that corner up at the ruined house. I believe we have time to look it up before you must go home. Come up, Dobbin!"

The willing old horse strode forward again.

"It's not just geometry that bothers me," Elizabeth confessed. "We had some questions in history to-day and it frightened me to have them show how little I knew. We were asked who were the Barbary pirates and what was the greatest time of America's merchant marine. Those are just the things I never can remember."

"History doesn't seem so hard," returned David, "except that, if you study it without a teacher, you get so interested in some parts that you forget to pay any attention to the others. You say that they asked you about the merchant marine and America's ships? Now I never thought of paying any