When the figure was drawn, and all the mysterious signs completed, the shirt-sleeve prophet became absorbed in an intricate calculation of such mysterious import that all his customer’s mathematical proficiency was unable to make out what it was all about. First he set down a long row of figures, which he added together with much difficulty, and then seemed to instantly conceive the most unrelenting hostility to the sum total. The mathematical tortures to which he put that unhappy amount; the arithmetical abuse which he heaped upon it, and the algebraic contumely with which he overwhelmed it, almost defy description. He first belabored it with the four simple rules; he stretched it with Addition; he cut it in two with Subtraction; he made it top-heavy with Multiplication, and tore it to pieces with Division—then he extracted its square root; then extracted the cube root of that, which left nothing of the unfortunate sum total but a small fraction, which he then divided by _ab_, and made “equal to” an infinitesimal part of some unknown _x_. Having thus wreaked his vengeance on the unhappy number, he laid away the surviving fraction in a cold corner of the slate, where he left it, first, however, giving a parting token of his bitter malignity by writing the minus sign before it, which made it perpetually worse than nothing, and reduced it to a state of irredeemable algebraic bankruptcy. This praiseworthy object being finally achieved, he proceeded to translate into intelligible English the result of his calculations, which he announced in the terms following: