427.—­PHEASANT-SHOOTING.

A Cockney friend, who is very apt to draw the long bow, and is evidently less of a sportsman than he pretends to be, relates to me the following not very credible yarn:—­

“I’ve just been pheasant-shooting with my friend the duke.  We had splendid sport, and I made some wonderful shots.  What do you think of this, for instance?  Perhaps you can twist it into a puzzle.  The duke and I were crossing a field when suddenly twenty-four pheasants rose on the wing right in front of us.  I fired, and two-thirds of them dropped dead at my feet.  Then the duke had a shot at what were left, and brought down three-twenty-fourths of them, wounded in the wing.  Now, out of those twenty-four birds, how many still remained?”

It seems a simple enough question, but can the reader give a correct answer?

428.—­THE GARDENER AND THE COOK.

A correspondent, signing himself “Simple Simon,” suggested that I should give a special catch puzzle in the issue of The Weekly Dispatch for All Fools’ Day, 1900.  So I gave the following, and it caused considerable amusement; for out of a very large body of competitors, many quite expert, not a single person solved it, though it ran for nearly a month.

[Illustration]

“The illustration is a fancy sketch of my correspondent, ‘Simple Simon,’ in the act of trying to solve the following innocent little arithmetical puzzle.  A race between a man and a woman that I happened to witness one All Fools’ Day has fixed itself indelibly on my memory.  It happened at a country-house, where the gardener and the cook decided to run a race to a point 100 feet straight away and return.  I found that the gardener ran 3 feet at every bound and the cook only 2 feet, but then she made three bounds to his two.  Now, what was the result of the race?”

A fortnight after publication I added the following note:  “It has been suggested that perhaps there is a catch in the ‘return,’ but there is not.  The race is to a point 100 feet away and home again—­that is, a distance of 200 feet.  One correspondent asks whether they take exactly the same time in turning, to which I reply that they do.  Another seems to suspect that it is really a conundrum, and that the answer is that ‘the result of the race was a (matrimonial) tie.’  But I had no such intention.  The puzzle is an arithmetical one, as it purports to be.”

429.—­PLACING HALFPENNIES.

[Illustration]

Here is an interesting little puzzle suggested to me by Mr. W. T. Whyte.  Mark off on a sheet of paper a rectangular space 5 inches by 3 inches, and then find the greatest number of halfpennies that can be placed within the enclosure under the following conditions.  A halfpenny is exactly an inch in diameter.  Place your first halfpenny where you like, then place your second coin at exactly the distance of an inch from the first, the third an inch distance from the second, and so on.  No halfpenny may touch another halfpenny or cross the boundary.  Our illustration will make the matter perfectly clear.  No. 2 coin is an inch from No. 1; No. 3 an inch from No. 2; No. 4 an inch from No. 3; but after No. 10 is placed we can go no further in this attempt.  Yet several more halfpennies might have been got in.  How many can the reader place?