HARPER'S YOUNG PEOPLE.
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[A PLEASANT EVENING.]
BY FRANK BELLEW.
Fig. 1.
I have been spending a portion of this autumn at the house of some old friends in the country. They are not exactly farmers, but they own a farm, so there were lots of cream and new milk, and fresh eggs and poultry, and red apples and nuts, and such country luxuries. I was paying them a long-promised visit with my wife, my two daughters, and my son. My friend's family consisted of himself, his wife, their son aged twenty, their daughter and her two children. Well, you see this made a pretty good party to start with. There were five of us and six of them—five and six are eleven.
Well, one evening we were seated round the table trying to amuse ourselves with dominoes, wiggles, and such things, when in came the young minister—a nice, amiable gentleman, whose cravat was generally twisted round to the back of his neck, but who reminded you somehow of a host of gentle characters in Dickens and Thackeray: Traddles, Dobbin, Toots, Mr. Dick, the Pale Young Gentleman (in Great Expectations), Tom Pinch, and several others. Not that he was precisely like either of them, but there was an air about him which reminded you of some pleasant book. Well, he came in and chatted a little while, when another ring was heard at the door, and a party of neighbors announced themselves, all fresh and frosty, viz., two Misses Larkin, two boy cousins, and two young gentlemen visitors from the city. Now, indeed, we had a party—eighteen in all.
Fig. 2.
First we talked, then we asked some riddles, then we played games—the Bachelor's Kitchen and such like. Then there was a pause; perceiving which, one of the young men from the city whispered to one of the boy cousins, he whispered to the daughter, and they all slipped out of the room. Conversation was resumed. Presently the door was thrown open, and in hopped the queerest-looking bird that any one ever saw out of a nightmare.
Fig. 3.
"This," said the young man from the city, "is the celebrated adjutant bird of the East Indies. This bird is to be seen familiarly walking about the streets of Calcutta, where he is, in fact, the Street-cleaning Bureau, Board of Health, and Captain Williams all combined. There are no ash barrels there, no garbage carts, no nothing; he gobbles up everything himself. He will swallow a leg of mutton at one gulp, and as for tomato cans, they are like strawberries to him. He can impale a man on his strong bill, and has done it before now—"
So went on the young man from the city, acting as showman, all the company roaring with laughter meantime, for the bird was irresistibly ludicrous, as you may partly judge by his portrait above (Fig. 3).
When they retired I went too, and saw how the bird was built, and this was the way they did it. First of all they procured a sheet of stiff brown paper, which they rolled into a cornucopia; then with a paper spill dipped in ink they marked on it a saw-like line to represent the mouth. Then they made a hole in the mouth, and passed through it a piece of picture cord; this was supposed to represent a worm or a snake (see Fig. 1). Then they fastened this cornucopia on the face of the boy cousin, as represented in Fig. 2. Then they procured a pair of yellow slippers, on which they pinned some slips of brown paper; these they put on the feet of the boy. Then they twisted a sheet around him, so as to hump his back and fill him out generally, and over this they fitted a rough gray shawl, which completed the bird, all except the eyes, which were made out of two round pieces of paper, with inked eyeballs, and fastened into their proper places with pins.
We had lots of fun that night. I can not pretend to tell you all we did; but one or two things I must describe, because they are worth doing again. A sheet was procured from the daughter, and spread on the floor. Each of the two boy cousins was blindfolded, and had an apron tied around his neck like a bib; then each was provided with a long wooden spoon and a bowl of bran, and they were placed opposite each other, as represented in our picture, and told to feed each other with the bran, encouraged by the promise that if they each succeeded in getting a mouthful of the bran, they should receive a very large piece of cake by way of reward. The struggles of these two boys were funny to the last degree. We all laughed and laughed till our sides ached again.
Another performance of the evening, though less funny, was quite entertaining. One of the gentlemen from the city arranged a kind of proscenium in one of the doorways, as represented in our engraving, where he performed many simple tricks of sleight of hand and illusion. Among others he took two walking canes, and played on them as you would on a fiddle, producing all the notes of the musical instrument. He took a common lead-pencil, and whistled on it most perfectly; and a bell without a clapper, and rang it distinctly. This astonished the audience very much, but the secret was very simple: he had a confederate in the other young man from the city, who, concealed behind the scenes, with a real fiddle, a real whistle, and a perfect bell produced the sounds, whilst his friend went through the motions in presence of the audience.
The illusion was perfect, and the trick is well worth trying at any little social gathering when you want amusement.