Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/171

 difficult problem to do at home, and Ben arrived with the correct answer for it. He was sent to the blackboard to write out his solution, and there was nothing correct in his demonstration except the final line. The teacher accused him of having found the example and its answer in some book of arithmetic, and Ben in self-defense had to explain that he had "just guessed" it.

"Well," the teacher said, sarcastically, "let us see you guessing. Turn your back to the board. Now tell me what are the three figures I've written on it."

Ben stood a moment, staring at the grinning class. The sympathetic face of a little girl in a back row caught his eye. And suddenly he gave the figures correctly.

"You're cheating!" the teacher cried. "You saw them reflected somewhere."

"No, I didn't," Ben pleaded. "I guessed them."

"Very good," the teacher said. "Keep your eyes on the floor and guess these!"

But by this time the boy was so bewildered and the class was in such an uproar that he could not have guessed his own name. He named three figures at random. Not one of them was right. "Hold out your hand," the teacher ordered.

When school was dismissed and Ben started, swollen-eyed, on his walk over the mountain to Wauchock, he was waylaid by the little girl from the back row. "I'm sorry," she said. "I got scared."