I once persuaded a fat chap who used to work for my show that he was a telepathist. The beginning of it was this way. I used to perform feats of the so-called thought-reading variety that were as genuine as such feats ever are. The fat chap used to try to imitate them. There was, for instance, the trick of walking blindfold into a room, and finding an article that had previously been hidden.
One day when there were a lot of us together in my dressing-room at the Hippodrome, Sheffield, I turned the conversation on to my assistant’s wonderful telepathic gifts, flattering him to the top of his bent. Previously, I had put the others up to it, and they one and all clamoured for an exhibition of his powers.
Fatty was nothing loth, and at my instigation he was taken from the room and blindfolded. An article was supposed to have been previously hidden somewhere within the room by one of the crowd, and I was deputed to walk behind him and “will” him the way he was to go in order to find it.
“You must,” I told him, “stand perfectly upright with your heels and toes close together, and presently you will feel my will power urging you forward in the direction you ought to go. Don’t resist the influence. Let yourself go. And you will find that, if my will power is sufficiently strong, it will lead you to where the hidden article is.”
Now it is a fact, as the reader can easily prove for himself, that if a man stands upright, blindfolded, or even with his eyes tightly shut, and with his heels and toes close together, his body will automatically sway forward; and this is precisely what happened to Fatty.
“I can feel the influence pushing me on,” he exclaimed excitedly, and started groping about the room. In a minute or two one of the men present quietly placed a cigarette-case on the table in front of his outstretched hand, and of course he grabbed it.
“Wonderful!” they shouted. “He’s found it.”
Fatty pulled the bandage from his eyes, and stood triumphant, his big, round, simple face beaming with pleasure and pride.
“I didn’t think I could do it,” he cried. “I didn’t think it was in me. I’m a marvel.”
But I pretended to be in doubt.