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Rh The Fairy laughed, and spread her dazzling wings glistening with all the glories of the higher mathematics.

Edwin closed dazzled eyes, and opened them as the desk lid shut down on his head, swayed by no uncertain hand. It was the mathematical master’s hand, in fact.

A new example was set. And, curiously enough, white rabbits were in it.

“If seven thousand five hundred and sixty-three white rabbits,” it began. Edwin, his brain in a whirl, worked it correctly, by a sort of inspiration, like an ancient prophet or a calculating machine.

When he returned, with his books in a strap, to the red villa whose gables meant home for him, he found an excited crowd dancing round the white-painted gates.

The whole of the front garden, as well as most of the back garden, was a seething mass of white rabbits. Seven thousand five hundred and sixty-three there were, to be exact. I alone know this. The joyous Edwin and his distracted parents were never able to count them.

“What a lot of hutches we shall want,” Edwin thought gaily. But when his father came home from the Stock Exchange, where