Crossword-Solution: NOUGHTS 7 letters, 5 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 11

The round noughts in the millionaire's ledger are safe in no sense; the same fluctuation which excites him with their increase depresses him with their diminution.

Maybe the teacher's nerves were too highly strung to endure the squeaking of gritty pencils, but I think the real reason for their banishment is, that slates invited too strongly the game of noughts and crosses, or tit-tat-toe, three in a row, the champion of indoor sports, and one entirely inimical to the study of the joggerfy lesson.

Behind the mill door, and invisible to the mere wayfarer who did not visit the family, were chalked addition and subtraction sums, many of them originally done wrong, and the figures half rubbed out and corrected, noughts being turned into nines, and ones into twos.

You will see from this that, at the end of the first year the single plant will have produced fifty more of its kind; by the end of the second year these will have increased to 2,500; and so on, in succeeding years, you get beyond even trillions; and I am not at all sure that I could tell you what the proper arithmetical denomination of the total number really is; but, at any rate, you will understand the meaning of all those noughts.

The strokes which represented the figures "15" were unquestionably a little, a very little, thicker than the strokes which represented the three zeros or "noughts" that followed.