PASSING A FINGER, ROD, AND EGG THROUGH A HAT.
In order to take from a hat a large quantity of paper in ribbons, and then doves, and even a duck or a rabbit, there is no need of special apparatus nor of a great amount of dexterity, and still less of the revolving bobbin or of the mysterious machine whose existence is generally believed in by the spectators when they see the paper falling regularly from the hat, and turning gracefully of itself as the water from a new sort of fountain would do.
Nor is there here any need of a high hat; a simple straw hat (or a cap, at a pinch) will suffice. The prestidigitateur holds close pressed to his breast and hidden under his coat a roll of the blue paper prepared for the printing apparatus of the Morse telegraph, and which is so tightly wound that it has the aspect and consistence of a wooden disk with a circular aperture in the center. In turning around after taking the hat, the opening of which rests against his breast, the operator deftly introduces into it the roll of paper, which has the proper diameter to allow it to enter by hard friction as far as the top of the hat, and stay where it is put even when the hat is turned over.
Were it needed, the paper might be held by a proper pressure of the left hand exerted from the exterior. The introduction of the paper is effected in a fraction of a second.
“Your hat, my dear sir, was doubtless a little too wide for your head, for I notice within it a band of paper designed to diminish the internal diameter,” says the prestidigitateur, while, at the same time, he draws from the hat the end that terminates the paper in the centre of the roll. Then he reverses the hat so that the interior cannot be seen by the spectators. The paper immediately begins to unwind of itself and to fall very regularly and without intermission to the right.
THE ENDLESS PAPER RIBBON.
When the fall of the paper begins to slacken, that is, in general, when no more than a third of the roll remains, the prestidigitateur turns the hat upside down, and with the right hand pulls out and rapidly revolves in the air the paper ribbon, whose capricious contours, succeeding one another before the first have had time to fall to the floor, produce a very pretty effect, as shown in our second engraving. The quantity of paper extracted from the hat appears also in this way much greater than it really is, and at length forms a pile of considerable bulk.