Fig. 10.
An amateur can render a common table more suitable for concealing any little object he wishes to have secreted, by placing three or four tumblers under each end of a plank, about the length to extend across the table, and throwing any common cloth over the board and table, or a kitchen table, covered with a cloth, having a drawer pulled out about six inches, will furnish a very good conjuror’s table. It is well to have the table rather broad, so as to keep the spectators at a sufficient distance.
TRICK 14.—TO EAT A DISH OF PAPER SHAVINGS, AND DRAW THEM OUT OF YOUR MOUTH LIKE AN ATLANTIC CABLE.
PREPARATION.
Procure three or four yards of the thinnest tissue paper of various colors. Cut these up in strips of half an inch or three-quarters of an inch breadth, and join them. They will form a continuous strip of many feet in length. Roll this up carefully in a flat coil, as ribbons are rolled up. Let it make a coil about as large as the top of an egg-cup or an old-fashioned hunting-watch. Leave out of the innermost coil about an inch or more of that end of the paper, so that you can easily commence unwinding it from the centre of the coil.
Procure a large dish or basketful of paper-shavings, which can be obtained at little cost from any bookbinder’s or stationer’s. Shaken out it will appear to be a large quantity. As you wish it to appear that you have eaten a good portion of them, you can squeeze the remainder close together, and then there will appear to be few left, and that your appetite has reason to be satisfied.
Commence the trick by proclaiming you have a voracious appetite, so that you can make a meal off paper-shavings. Bend down over the plate, and take up handful after handful, pretend to munch them in your mouth, and make a face as if swallowing them, and as you take up another handful, put out those previously in your mouth, and put them aside. Having gone on with this as long as the spectators seem amused by it, at last, with your left hand, slip the prepared ball of tissue paper into your mouth, managing to place towards your teeth the end you wish to catch hold of with your right hand, for pulling the strip out from your mouth. You will take care also not to open your teeth too widely, lest the whole coil or ball should come out all at once.
Having got hold of the end, draw it slowly and gently forward. It will unroll to a length of twenty yards or more in a continuous strip, much to the amusement of the spectators.
When it has come to the end, you may remark: “I suppose we have come to a fault, as there is a ‘solution of continuity here, just as the strongest cables break off,’ so we must wait to pick up the end again, and go on next year, when the Great Eastern again goes out with its next Atlantic Cable.”