A certain set of highly ingenious resources are, with
the Prefect, a sort of Procrustean bed to which he forcibly adapts his
designs. But he perpetually errs by being too deep or too shallow, for
the matter in hand; and many a schoolboy is a better reasoner than
he. I knew one about eight years of age, whose success at guessing in
the game of 'even and odd' attracted universal admiration. This game
_is_ simple, and is played with marbles. One player holds in his hand
a number of these toys, and demands of another whether that number is
even or odd. If the guess is right, the guesser wins one; if wrong, he
loses one. The boy to whom I allude won all the marbles of the
school. Of course he had some principle of guessing; and this lay in
mere observation and admeasurement of the astuteness of his
opponents. For example, an arrant simpleton is his opponent, and,
holding up his closed hand asks, 'Are they even or odd?' Our schoolboy
replies, 'Odd' and loses; but upon the second trial he wins, for he
then says to himself, 'the simpleton had them even upon the first
trial, and his amount of cunning is just sufficient to make him have
them odd upon the second; I will therefore guess odd;' he guesses odd,
and wins. Now, with a simpleton a degree above the first he would have
reasoned thus: 'This fellow finds that in the first instance I guessed
odd, and, in the second, he will propose to himself, upon the first
impulse, a simple variation from even to odd, as did the first
simpleton; but then a second thought will suggest that this is too
simple a variation, and finally he will decide upon putting it even as
before.
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