His moustache is white now and his head a little bald – for has he not been entertaining the world for fifty-five years with his odd conceptions? But I can fancy him when he made his first puzzle fifty-five years ago, younger-looking but no more acute mentally than he is now, when he handles sometimes one hundred thousand letters a day from his correspondents, eager to share in the prizes he offers for the solution of his puzzles. He is reputed to have made a million dollars out of that active brain yet he is as modest of demeanour and as quiet of dress as though he were a clerk in a business establishment at twenty-five dollars a week. Sam Loyd is not of one generation any more than he is of one country – he is universal and everlasting.Ī quiet man, with a ready tongue and a quick wit showing through a twinkling eye – that is what first impresses you about the famous puzzle – man. Long after the brain that gave them life is quieted – and may that be many, many years hence – a new generation will be watching the Chinaman fade away at the movement of the pivoted card or shifting the counters so as to compel Fourteen and Fifteen to take their places in serial relation. Yet one can never speak of the “Fourteen – Fifteen” puzzle or “Get Off the Earth” as old. It was like renewing my youth to meet him – to hear him ask me if I remembered the “Fourteen-Fifteen” puzzle, or the trick donkeys, or “Get Off the Earth.” And to hear how those old friends of boyhood’s days came to exist and something of their history since I first knew them – that was like meeting an old, old friend and hearing him tell the story of his life.
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