"The measures, then," he continued, "were good in their kind,
and well executed; their defect lay in their being inapplicable to the
case, and to the man. 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.
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