THE EGG AND HAT TRICK.
Some months ago, in a Parisian public establishment, a clown took a hat and a handkerchief, and then, after showing, by spreading it out, that the handkerchief was empty, drew an egg from the folds of the crumpled fabric and allowed it to drop into the hat. Then he took up the handkerchief, shook it out again, crumpled it up, found another egg, and let it drop into the hat, and so on. When it might have been supposed that the hat contained a certain number of eggs, he turned it upside down, and, lo and behold, the hat was empty! All the eggs from the handkerchief were reduced to a single one attached by a thread to one of the sides of the handkerchief, and which the amusing operator maliciously exhibited, after seeming to look for the vanished eggs.
While the handkerchief was stretched out, the egg was behind it, and, although it was shaken, remained suspended by its thread. In crumpling the handkerchief it was easy to seem to find the egg in it, and to put it in the hat, where it did not remain, however, for, lifted by the thread, it resumed its place behind the handkerchief. Our [engraving] shows the handkerchief at the moment that the egg has been removed by the thread on the side opposite that of the spectators.
On attaching a black thread, sixteen or twenty inches in length, to an empty egg, and selecting the egg thus prepared from a lot of ordinary eggs, as if by chance, we have a ready means of amusing and mystifying spectators for a long time. Having hooked the free extremity of the thread to a buttonhole of the waistcoat, let us lay the egg upon the table. After apparently ordering it to approach us, it suffices to recede from the table to make the docile egg obey the command. By the same means it may be made to make its exit alone from a hat; or, again, by bearing upon the invisible thread, it may be made to dance upon a cane or upon the hand; in a word, to perform various operations that eggs are not accustomed to perform.
MULTIPLICATION OF COINS.
Upon a small rectangular tray of japanned sheet iron, similar to those in common use, are placed seven coins ([Fig. 1]). A spectator is asked to receive these in his hand and to put the coins back upon the tray, one by one, and to count them with a loud voice as he does so. It is then found that the number has doubled, there being fourteen instead of seven. The same operation repeated gives as a result twenty-one coins.