That eminent and more or less veracious traveller Captain Longbow has a
great grievance with the public. He claims that during a recent
expedition in Arctic regions he actually reached the North Pole, but
cannot induce anybody to believe him. Of course, the difficulty in such
cases is to produce proof, but he avers that future travellers, when they
succeed in accomplishing the same feat, will find evidence on the spot.
He says that when he got there he saw a bear going round and round the
top of the pole (which he declares _is_ a pole), evidently perplexed by
the peculiar fact that no matter in what direction he looked it was
always due south. Captain Longbow put an end to the bear's meditations by
shooting him, and afterwards impaling him, in the manner shown in the
illustration, as the evidence for future travellers to which I have
alluded.
[Illustration]
When the Captain got one hundred miles south on his return journey he had
a little experience that is somewhat puzzling. He was surprised one
morning, on looking down from an elevation, to see no fewer than eleven
bears in his immediate vicinity. But what astonished him more than
anything else was the curious fact that they had so placed themselves
that there were seven rows of bears, with four bears in every row.
Whether or not this was the result of pure accident he cannot say, but
such a thing might have happened. If the reader tries to make eleven dots
on a sheet of paper so that there shall be seven rows of dots with four
dots in every row, he will find some difficulty; but the captain's
alleged grouping of the bears is quite possible. Can you discover how
they were arranged?