Spoofing a mesmerist—The spoofer spoofed—Spoof card tricks—Racecourse sharps—The “dud” diamond wheeze—I am beautifully “had”—Three-card trick sharps—A Newcastle adventure—Bunny’s spoof—Spoofing a “new chum”—The performing elephant and the dude—Wheezes and gags.

I was once supposed to have been mesmerised myself. It happened at Newcastle. I was a guest at an hotel there where a professional mesmerist also chanced to be staying.

One day, in the course of conversation, I expressed incredulity regarding his alleged power. “You can’t mesmerise me,” I said.

“Well,” he retorted, “I don’t mind trying. But you must promise not to try and resist me. You must remain passive.”

“All right,” I said, “I will. Go ahead with the show.”

He made several passes, during which I kept smiling at him, and shaking my head, as much as to say it was no good.

Then all of a sudden I threw myself into a state of rigidity, a trick I had learnt and practised years previously, and pretended to go off into a cataleptic trance.

The mesmerist was hugely elated. The others present, most of whom knew me, were considerably surprised. Not one of them but believed that he was witnessing a genuine hypnotic phenomenon. After a while the mesmerist made several passes designed to bring me to. But herein he failed. Again and again he tried. It was no good. The only movement I made was to bite my lip so that it bled, and roll up my eyes horribly, leaving only the whites visible.

The mesmerist began to get badly frightened, and after one or two more vain attempts he ran out of the house to, as he said, fetch a doctor. Meanwhile the others carried me, still rigid, upstairs to bed.

A friend volunteered to stay and watch me, and after a while I came to of my own accord.

“Thank God!” exclaimed my friend, and called out for the others to come up and have a look at me.

“Fine bit of play-acting, wasn’t it?” I said.

But the others would not believe me. They were quite sure in their own minds that I really had been mesmerised, and only when I repeated to them practically the whole of the conversation that had passed between them while I was in my supposed trance, did they realise how completely they had been spoofed.

As for the mesmerist, he never came back to the hotel. Instead of going for a doctor, he had made a bee-line for the railway station, and skipped the town. Evidently he thought it was all up with me.

Here is a spoof bet which may be new to my readers. You select a man of obviously bigger physique than yourself, and offer to wager him, say, a sovereign, that you measure the bigger round the chest. If he takes you on, as he probably will, you hand him a tape measure and say, “So as to be perfectly fair, you measure me, and I’ll measure you.” When the test is finished he will say that he has won. “Oh, no,” you reply, “I’ve won. You are the bigger man of the two, and it was I who measured you.” I spoofed one of the “fliest” men in England with this trick on one occasion.

Another time I was spoofed myself at the Empire, Liverpool, where the Macnaughtons took my carefully prepared pack of cards and stuck them together with glue, so that they formed a more or less solid block. The result, when I started to attempt to perform my tricks with them, can be more easily imagined than described.

By the way, speaking of card tricks, the majority of these, though infinitely puzzling to the observer, are usually susceptible of a quite simple explanation. Take, for example, that known as “The Two Queens,” and which is not infrequently worked on racecourses with a view to fleecing the public.

The way it is done is as follows: The performer takes the two Queens of either colour, black or red, and holds them up so that the audience can see them. Cutting the remainder of the pack into two lots he places one of the Queens upon the top half. At this point the performer’s hat falls off, or his attention is apparently distracted by some cause, and he turns away from the cards, still holding the other Queen. Someone in the company meanwhile quickly places a few cards from the bottom half of the pack upon the Queen, which had been placed upon the top half. When the performer resumes he announces that he will place the second Queen upon the first, and accordingly places it upon the cards. He now asserts that the two Queens are together, and offers to bet that he will produce them in that order. The audience, thinking otherwise, make various bets, and then the performer dealing the cards from the bottom of the pack produces the two Queens one after the other. This is accomplished by means of a confederate. When the performer has shuffled and cut, he notes the top card when the pack is cut. One of the Queens is placed on this card. When the hat falls off the confederate places the other cards as described, and the Queens are really separated. In dealing from the bottom the performer watches carefully until he arrives at the card which he had previously noted when the cut was made. When this is dealt he knows that the next card will be one of the Queens. So, instead of dealing this he pulls it back underneath the pack with the fingers of the left hand, and continues dealing. He produces the other Queen, and it is then a simple matter to deal the first Queen which he had pulled back. A shrewd spectator would notice that the Queens appear in reverse order to that in which they were placed in the pack, but audiences are so amazed that they don’t notice a little thing like that.

It is not by means of card tricks alone, however, that the unwary are cheated on racecourses, and elsewhere. I could fill a good-sized volume if I liked with accounts of the wiles of some of the “fly” gentry frequenting these places. One of them once “had” me beautifully, though, I need hardly say, not at cards. It concerned a diamond ring.

The man, a well-known Birmingham racecourse frequenter, brought it to me while I was playing there, and asked me to buy it, saying that he had won it at cards. This story, I reflected, might or might not be true. Anyway, it was nothing to do with me. I am a good judge of diamonds, and I examined this one very carefully. I saw at once that it was a splendid blue-white stone, and worth certainly not less than £80. The man asked me £40 for it. I offered him £20, which sum, after some hesitation, he agreed to take. “Hand over the money,” he said, “and the ring is yours.”

This conversation took place in one of the hotel bars in the centre of the city, and I had not so much money on me. I accordingly told him to bring the ring round that night to the theatre where I was playing, and I would let him have the money; which he did. The stone was to all appearance perfect, blazing with fire, and I put it in my waistcoat pocket, thinking what a nice surprise it would be for my wife.

So it was a surprise, but not in the way I intended. For next morning all the blaze and beauty had gone out of the stone. It looked like a piece of ordinary glass. I rushed round to a jeweller’s with it. “You’ve been had,” he explained. “The stone is not a diamond at all, but a jargoon, a gem whose lustre, especially if it is well polished, exactly resembles that of the diamond. Only it is extremely evanescent.” I may say that the stone I first examined was a genuine diamond, and worth fully four times what I agreed to pay. It was afterwards that the jargoon was substituted for it, and in the hurry of dressing I did not notice the difference.

Here is a tricky way of tossing for drinks and winning. It cannot be described as cheating, being rather in the nature of forced suggestion. You say to a man, “Come on, I’ll toss you for drinks round,” at the same time pulling out a coin and placing it flat on the counter, or elsewhere, with the tail uppermost, and, of course, covered so that he cannot see it. “Come on,” you say, speaking very rapidly, yet distinctly. “Cry to me. Which is it? Heads or tails.”

In nine cases out of ten the man will cry heads, but it must be done quickly, without giving him time to think; and you want to lay a little emphasis, but not too much, on the word “heads.” Anybody can try this for themselves, and they will find that what I say is true.

Another coin-tossing trick! Where you are asked to “cry to pieces,” a favourite trick with men who are not too particular is to say, with affected carelessness: “Oh, I’ll have the same as the top one.” In this way, if the first coin is a head, he starts off with one to the good, and the man who puts down the coins is, of course, handicapped to that extent.

Speaking of racecourse sharps, I once was tackled by a gang of three-card men under rather peculiar circumstances. I was working at the Empire, Newcastle, where I topped the bill as the World’s Premier Card Manipulator. With me were the Poluski Brothers, and Sam Poluski, who is well known in the profession as a sportsman, introduced me to a local tout, called Bunny, who used to back horses for him, and incidentally, if he heard of a “good thing,” he would tell Sam about it, and Sam would tip him for his trouble if the horse won. If it didn’t win, then Bunny got his commission from the bookie with whom he placed the bet, so that he was all right either way.

Bunny was perfectly straight himself, but he, of course, knew all “the boys.” Well, on the Friday of the week I was there, there was what they call up there “a flapper meeting”; that is to say, a small race meeting got up under National Hunt rules among the farmers and others. I went there alone, but took Bunny with me as a sort of bodyguard, and to show me the ropes.

The place where the meeting was to be held was about half an hour’s run from Newcastle by train, and I arranged for Bunny to meet me at the Central Station. I got there first, and I must say that I had seldom seen a tougher-looking crowd assembled anywhere. By and by Bunny turned up, and I took two first-class tickets, for I didn’t like the look of the mob on the platform, and I thought that by this means, and if we waited until the train was just about to start, we might manage to get a compartment to ourselves. If we could do this, I reflected, we were all right, for the train, a special race one, did not stop until we got to the course.

I was at this time a youngish lad, with curly hair, and looked, I suppose, a typical “pie-can,” which is the bookies’ way of characterising a “mug.” The train was a bit late at starting, and while we were waiting I distinctly saw Bunny “give the office” to a gang of “the boys.”

“Here, Bunny,” I said, taking him to one side. “No larks. What’s the game?”

“All right, Carlton, old man,” he replied. “Don’t get alarmed. I’m only going to have a lark with some of these chaps.”

I wasn’t at all reassured at this, for the gang didn’t look to me at all the kind it was in the least advisable to play larks on. However, there was not time to say anything further, for at that moment the whistle blew, and Bunny jumped into an empty first-class compartment and I after him, so too did five or six of the boys; the same Bunny had given the tip to. Just as the train was starting a detective poked his head in the window, and cried warningly, “Beware of card-sharpers.” I quickly slipped my diamond pin out of my tie, and stuck it in the back of my waistcoat. Then I buttoned up my coat over my inside pocket, where the bulk of my money was, and waited.

I hadn’t long to wait. Within a minute or two the three cards were produced, and the old familiar performance gone through; the men, all apparently strangers to each other, winning and losing alternately. Bunny also took a hand and won. Was he not, in a sense, “one of the boys”? It was, of course, all stage-managed for my benefit.

But I wasn’t having any. Or at least I pretended I wasn’t. When I did at length yield to their repeated entreaties, I won a sovereign, and declined to bet any more. Thereupon they began to get nasty; so, thinking the thing had gone far enough, I said: “Look here, boys, you took me for a pie-can. Well, I’m not. But I’m a sport. I don’t want your money. Here’s your quid back, and here’s another to get drinks with.”

Then, picking up the cards, I remarked quite casually: “Let me show you how we work the three-card trick down where I come from.”

So saying I took out three cards, including the Queen of Spades, and throwing them down on their faces, I invited them to pick out the “lady.”

One of them selected a card. It was the wrong one. Then another of the gang chose another. It also was not the “lady.” Then I myself turned up the remaining card. And that also was not the “lady.” There was no Queen there. I had palmed it, and substituted a plain card for it.

The sharpers gazed at me in blank amazement. Bunny, in his corner, rolled in his seat, and screamed with laughter.

Then, when he had recovered his breath, he said: “Don’t you know who it is? Why you were all with me last night at the Empire, and saw him on the stage there. It’s Carlton, the world’s premier card-manipulator.”

And he went off into another fit of laughter.

But “the boys” didn’t laugh. They had wasted the journey, to say nothing of their fare money. And the language they used to Bunny was quite unprintable.

Of course none of them had recognised me without my stage make-up.

I don’t know why it should be so, but it is a fact that we professionals are exceedingly prone to play larks on one another. A new-comer in the profession is especially likely to find himself made a butt of. It is good-natured chaff, and if he takes it in good part—well. If not, why so much the worse for him.

Once, when I was performing at Liverpool, I recall that there was a “new chum” there who was doing some sort of show business in a sketch. He was rather stuck-up and touchy, and he was put through it rather unmercifully in consequence. One night, for instance, he would find his boots had been securely nailed to his dressing-room floor. Another time the sleeves of his coat would be sewn together, and so on.

Well, one night he was waiting in the wings for his cue to go on, and was holding a tall hat in his hand, which he used in his performance. Suddenly this was snatched from him from behind, and jammed on his head.

“There you are,” he cried to the manager, without turning round. “These fellows are always playing larks on me before it is my cue to go on. It puts me off my business. I wonder you allow it.” “That’s all right from your point of view,” replied the manager. “But the culprit in this case is too big for me to tackle. Better have a go at him yourself.”

Whereupon the victimised “pro.” swung round on his heel in order to take stock of the offender. He found himself face to face with one of Lockhart’s elephants. The beast had been trained by its master to do the trick, and seeing the hat held temptingly had taken advantage of the opportunity.

When the dog-muzzling order was previously in force, Dan Lesson, who was one of the best-known practical jokers in the profession, one day fixed a needle to the front of his dog’s muzzle, allowing it to project an eighth of an inch. And—well you know how friendly dogs are. Another “pro.” fixed a similar needle arrangement to the “push” of his electric bell.

Yet another wheeze of his was to address about fifty envelopes to as many of his friends and acquaintances. These he posted, but omitted to put stamps on. Inside was a card, with these words neatly inscribed on it: “Bet you a penny you paid twopence.”

I think that the following incident is about as perfect an example of the “double cross” as it is possible to conceive.

I was playing in a certain town in the Midlands, and amongst the other performers there was a bright, particular “Knut” who was, as he himself expressed it, “dead nuts” on the girls. The rest of us took advantage of this to, as we thought, play a game on him.

One day he received a letter, written in a disguised feminine hand by one of us, which ran as follows: “Dear Mr. Blank,—I have seen your show from the front and I think it’s simply ripping. But not more ripping, I am sure, than you are yourself if one could only get to know you. May I have that pleasure? If so, meet me opposite the fountain in the park to-morrow afternoon at three. I will wear a blue navy costume trimmed white, suÈde gloves, and a red rose in my bodice. Signed: One of your admirers—Bessie.”

All the next morning the recipient of this missive strutted about looking awfully pleased with himself, but, of course, said not a word to anyone. Meanwhile we were busy helping a female impersonator, who chanced to be playing at the same hall, to make up as the supposititious Bessie.

Shortly before three he took his place on a seat near the fountain, blue costume, toque, suÈde gloves, and rose, all complete. We were hidden in the undergrowth at the back, on tiptoe of expectation, ready to enjoy our carefully planned joke.

Presently along comes Mr. Knut, dressed to kill. The female impersonator put on his most engaging smile, and half rose to greet him, when to his and our astonishment and dismay a real girl dressed in exactly the same fashion stepped forward from another direction, and taking his arm, proudly marched off with him.

He had, of course, tumbled to our little joke, and had double-crossed us. Needless to say we felt rather small.

Here is another “girl story.” I had in my employ at one time a big, handsome chap who was also, like the knut mentioned above, exceedingly fond of the fair sex. He was a favourite with them, too, so that he practically had a sweetheart in every town we visited. He used to boast to me of his many conquests, giving me names and full particulars. Of these I made mental notes.

Finally he became engaged to be married to one of his numerous flames, the wedding being fixed for a certain day at noon. Early that morning I sent off prepaid telegrams to the managers of various halls in towns where we had performed, and where I knew that old sweethearts of his resided, asking them to wire the bridegroom as per the formula I sent them. These telegrams I arranged to arrive at the bride’s house, addressed of course to the bridegroom, shortly before the ceremony.

I was not there, but I heard afterwards graphic accounts of what happened. It appears that the first wire arrived a few minutes before the happy couple were due to leave for the church. The bridegroom, quite unsuspicious, seized it and opened it, imagining it to be a telegram of congratulation.

But directly he glanced at it, his face fell, and he tried to put it in his pocket. The bride, however, seeing that something was wrong, snatched it from him, and read it herself. Then she gave a scream and fell in a faint.

The telegram, which was from Halifax, read as follows: “You base deceiver. Shall be there to forbid the marriage. Think of our child. Alice.”

In vain the poor chap protested. Nobody would believe him; and to make matters worse, a few minutes later another telegram arrived, from Manchester this time. It read: “Are you going to desert me like this after faithfully promising to marry me? Beware! Jennie.”

Other similar wires came to hand at intervals, and the bride insisted, on arriving at the church, on showing the whole batch to the clergyman who was to perform the ceremony. He, good man, insisted on postponing the marriage for an hour in order to see if anybody turned up to forbid it. Naturally, however, and of course, nobody did; but in order I suppose to make assurance doubly sure, when he came to the part where any person desirous of forbidding the ceremony is invited to come forward, he repeated the words slowly three times before finally uniting the couple.

I may say that I never really thought that my little joke would have been taken so seriously by all concerned, or I would most certainly never have perpetrated it.

Another practical joke in which a “dud” telegram played a part rather misfired towards the end. The affair happened at Brighton, where, as it chanced, a famous theatrical star (whom I will call Estelle), a well-known mimic (who shall be Smith), and myself were performing.

Each of us was putting up at a different hotel, Estelle (I think) at the Grand, and Smith at the Metropole, where he had engaged rooms for himself and wife, who was devoted to him, and who was also very, very jealous of him.

Knowing this, I got my assistant, a man named McMillan, to disguise his handwriting, and dispatch to Smith a fake telegram as if from Estelle, couched in imitation French, and asking him (Smith) to come round and see her at her hotel that evening. The wire, I may add, ran something like this: “Voulez vous mi sheri sus soir? respondez tuts weet.—Estelle.”

I got McMillan to send the wire off from the Brighton Post Office early in the morning, and it was delivered to Smith, as I had foreseen, while the couple were in bed. Smith read it, and tried to smuggle it on one side, but his wife snatched it away and read it also. Then, of course, the fat was in the fire. The good lady was out of bed in an instant, and throwing on some clothes, rushed round to Estelle’s hotel.

“You try to steal my husband!” she screamed indignantly to the astonished and but half-awake actress. “You wicked woman!”

In vain did poor Estelle protest, and that with almost equal indignation. “I no want your husband. Your husband—pouf! I can have kings! Kings, I tell you!”

“A king!” corrected Mrs. Smith, with emphasis.

“Well, then, a king,” agreed Estelle. “And he is very good to me. Everyone knows that. What I want with your husband?”

There was a lot more talk, and in the end Mrs. Smith, still unconvinced, went back to her hotel, packed up her things, and took the first train back to London.

Soon afterwards Smith came to me and told me all about it, asking my advice.

“Somebody’s been having a game with you,” I said. “Let’s go round to the Post Office, and try and get a look at the original of the telegram.”

We went, and after some demur the postmaster allowed us to see the telegraph form. Smith scanned it carefully, but McMillan had well carried out my instructions as to disguising his handwriting, and he could make nothing of it.

Then, in an evil moment, it occurred to him to turn the form over, and there at the back, in the space provided for the name and address of the sender, he read, “Carlton, Hippodrome, Brighton.” My dresser, instead of putting the name and address of the actress, had, in a moment of temporary forgetfulness, inserted my own.

Smith, I will say, took the matter in good part; but I had a rough time explaining matters to his wife.

A joke I once saw played by one friend on another struck me as being amazingly funny. One was clean-shaven, the other had a long thick beard, into which his friend stuck some half-dozen prawns, without, of course, his being aware of it. It did look funny. Try it yourself. But don’t try it on a man who is bigger than you, or possibly awkward results may ensue.

The late Dan Lesson, as I have already remarked, was a rare hand at these sort of practical jokes, and speaking of prawns somehow naturally reminds me of kippers. On one occasion Dan was dissatisfied at the way the orchestra played his music, so he got a none too fresh kipper and tacked it inside the bass viol. In a few days that orchestra was the sickest orchestra in England. The smell was something awful. It was hot weather, and the theatre was a bit close anyhow. They pulled up the boards. They even tore up the drains. But they didn’t succeed in locating where the smell came from. For all I know the mummified remains of that kipper, now of course no longer smellable, is in that viol yet.

The trick, I may add, is an old one with music-hall artistes who want to get even with a bad landlady, the kipper in this case being nailed under the leaf of the table near the centre. I knew of one case where the local sanitary inspector was actually called in. He had all the drains up, and then failed to find out whence the overpowering odour emanated from.

Another similar “stunt” is to put a pinch of gunpowder in a bloater, and hand her the doctored fish with strict instructions that it is to be grilled, not fried.

Many funny stories could be told by performers of their experiences with their landladies. Of course, there are good and bad of every kind, good cooks and bad cooks, honest women and dishonest women.

My Christmas dinner in Edinburgh where I was performing in pantomime some years ago I am not likely to forget. My mother sent me a Christmas pudding, and she prided herself on her skill in making them. I bought a fine turkey, and invited all my pals round to my special Christmas dinner. Of course in Scotland they do not recognise Christmas Day, and all the theatres and music-halls are open, New Year’s Day being the big holiday there. However, to get back to the Christmas dinner! I had previously told all my pals how nice my mother made Christmas puddings, but imagine my surprise when my landlady served up the turkey—she had stuffed it with the pudding!

On another occasion when I was performing at the Theatre Royal, Dublin, my wife asked me what I would like for supper, and I answered, “sausages, mashed potatoes and onions,” telling her at the same time to be sure to ask the landlady if she knew how to cook them. She replied, “Av coorse,” adding that she had cooked them hundreds of times before. When I got them, however, they were served up like Irish stew. She had put the beautiful Cambridge sausages, the onions, and potatoes in the pot together, and said, on being remonstrated with: “Sure, that’s the way we cook them in Oireland.” This incident was capped later on at Cork where I fancied a shoulder of mutton. The landlady fried it in a frying-pan.

I remember once a very dishonest landlady in Leeds, the pick of the bunch. I used to go out and buy my own things in those days and always kept my tea, sugar, etc., in a little cupboard in my combined room. Everything used to vanish, but she always had an excuse on the tip of her tongue, so after half a bottle of whisky had gone one night I put some jalap in another whisky bottle. I had to laugh, for she was running up and down stairs all night long complaining of pains in her stomach, but although half the contents of the whisky bottle containing the jalap had gone, she persisted in declaring that she had never touched it. Later on, when my tea had nearly all vanished from the caddy, and she had the audacity to complain to me as to how much tea I drank, I carefully caught a fly and put it alive in the tea caddy. When I got home, and took down the caddy to put my tea in the pot, the fly had gone, but even then she would not admit her dishonesty. So I made up my mind to catch her properly the next time. I carefully counted six potatoes, not letting her know I had counted them, and asked her to boil them for my dinner; but she had me again, she mashed them!

To “have” the average man on “a little bit of string” is quite easy, and some of the simplest “gags” I have found the most effective. For instance, you ask a man if he is good at mental arithmetic. The probability is he says that he is. You then ask him two or three exceedingly easy questions, such as, for example, what is twice seven, how many times does six go into eighteen, and so on. Then you say, “How many penny buns make a dozen,” followed, when he has answered it correctly, by the catch question, “How many half-penny ones?” He is practically certain to answer on the spur of the moment, “Twenty-four.”

Here is another equally simple catch. You take a piece of white paper, tell a man to place his forefinger on it, and offer to bet him you can draw a ring round it with a piece of lead pencil that he can’t lift his finger out of. You then draw a small ring on the paper round the tip of the finger, and ask him to lift his finger out of it. Of course he does so quite easily. You repeat this once or twice; then you draw your ring round the forefinger itself.

Or you get a man to put an easily fitting ring on his little finger, then join the tip of your little finger to the tip of his, and ask him if he thinks it possible for you to remove the ring from his finger without moving yours. He will almost certainly pronounce the feat an impossible one, when all you have to do is to slip the ring off his little finger and on to yours, and the trick is done. The ring is no longer on his finger. It is on yours. And the connection between the two fingers, yours and his, has not been severed for an instant. Then you say: “And now do you think it is possible for me to take the ring off both our fingers without severing the connection.” He is sure to say, “No.” Whereupon you just lift the ring so that it does not touch either, and the trick is done.

These little “spoofs” sound very simple after they are explained, but all the same I have “had” some of the smartest men for “drinks round” with them. Once, too, in Denver, I recollect a professional gambler rather got on my nerves by bragging about the amount of money he carried about with him. “Look here,” I said suddenly, withdrawing my closed fist from my trousers pocket, “I’ll bet you five dollars I’ve got more money in my hand than you have.”

“Done!” he cried, and diving his hand into his pocket he withdrew it stuffed full of gold pieces.

Mine held a matter of a few cents. “I’ve won,” he cried, exhibiting his fistful of wealth.

“Not at all,” I retorted, “I said in my hand. That money is not in my hand; it’s in yours. You’ve lost. Pay up.”

Which he did, with the best grace he could.

A few days later he met me, and told me that he had won over five hundred dollars from fellow gamblers by means of the trick. And these men were supposed to be among the “widest” on the American continent.

Here is a trick game with matches which sounds as if nothing could be fairer, and which yet is, in reality, an arrant swindle. The man who wants to practise it starts off by telling his opponent (and dupe) that it is a Chinese gambling game. This tends to throw him off his guard.

He then takes a number of matches and places them under his hat. Next he tells the other fellow to take any number of matches from the box, place them on the table, and lift the hat. “If,” he says, “you have put down an even number of matches, and the sum total of both heaps of matches, yours and mine, is even, then you win. If you have put down an odd number, and the sum total of both heaps of matches, yours and mine, is odd, then also you win. Otherwise you lose.”

This seems perfectly fair and aboveboard, yet in reality the game is entirely in the hands of the man who puts the matches under the hat. If he puts an even number of matches (say six) there, and the other man puts down an even number (say four) then the total (ten) is an even number, and the other fellow wins. If the other man puts down three he also wins, he having put down an odd number, and the sum total of the two heaps being odd.

In short, if I, who am supposed to be working the trick, choose to put an even number of matches under the hat in the first instance, then the other man must win. But equally, if I put an odd number, he must lose, for in that case if he puts an odd number down the sum total of the two heaps is bound to be even, and if he puts an even number down the sum total is bound to be odd.

Here is a trick which invariably creates a good deal of fun and amusement. I call it “The Vanishing Hair.”

At an evening party, or other similar gathering, you pluck a hair—first asking permission, of course!—from the head of one of the ladies present. This, you say, you will cause to vanish mysteriously, and you get someone to tie a knot in it so as to identify it. This, to create an impression.

You thereupon call for a small flat tea-tray, into which you pour a tumbler of clean water, forming a light film upon the surface, on which you place the hair, where it floats serenely, plain for all folk to see.

“Now,” you say, “you all see the hair is there. Watch closely while I count three, and at the word ‘three’ you will see it suddenly and mysteriously disappear.”

At this they all crowd round, bending closer down and peering intently at the hair floating on the thin film of water.

“One—two—three!” you say, and bring your hand down flat with force on the hair, when, of course, the water flies up into their faces and they hurriedly back away wiping their eyes. Meanwhile the hair most certainly does disappear. You see to that.