MAGICAL READING.
Ask your audience to be seated, while you talk for a few minutes on the wonders of occult science. Having mystified them as much as possible, you arouse their curiosity by announcing that you are now prepared to state whatever they may choose to draw or write, provided the sentence is a short one, by pressing the words or picture against your forehead, instead of reading with the eye.
You then distribute lead pencils, and equal sized slips of paper to all who wish to try, and take your seat at a table, on which you put a work-basket, with the request that when they are finished, they will fold the papers over once and then drop them in the basket.
When this is done you draw out any paper you may first touch; unfolding it so that you cannot read, you press it against your forehead, being careful to cover the entire paper with the fingers of each hand, which touch each other. You must explain that this contact is necessary for your revelation. After some minutes spent in thought, you read it and immediately draw another paper, laying each one before you, behind the basket.
The trick is simple, and consists in reading any word or sentence which may first occur to you, for the first paper, but reading the words thereon, or noting the picture when you lay it behind the basket. The picture or words on the first paper are read for the second, the second read for the third, and so on, until the last one has been pressed to the forehead, in removing which it is hidden by being crushed in the hand, or in whichever way may prove the easiest at the time, as the last paper is a necessity to make up for the one you falsely read.
It is not often that this trick is detected, unless it is bunglingly shown, and for that there is no excuse, as it is ridiculous to exhibit magic without long and careful practice.
Always change as much as possible the method of exhibition and never show this feat twice in one evening. Remember that diversion is an important feature in all magical entertainment; therefore you should be a capital story-teller, have a fund of funny stories on which you call at a moment’s need, for the attention of your friends must be constantly turned from your nervousness.
Every one understands that they are being deceived. You must be a clever magician or they will discover how.