“Well, it never yet was ordained that this persimmon seed was to grow,” said the juggler, still game, though with a fluctuating color. He fished the stone out from the earth, and, dusting it off with his fine white handkerchief, put it between his strong molar teeth and cracked it. He would not again invite attention to the reluctance of the audience to approach him, so he laid it down on the edge of the front bench with the remark, “You can see for yourselves the kernel is withered; that thing has no capacities for growth.”
One or two looked cautiously at the withered kernel within the riven pit, and then glanced significantly at each other. It was shrunken, old, worthless, as he had said, but then his black art was doubtless sufficient to have withered it with the mere wish.
“I don’t know a persimmon sprout from a dogwood, or a sumach, or anything else,” declared the juggler. His face was hard and dogged; he was compelled in his own behoof to unmask himself and show how very superficial were his cleverest efforts. He did it as ungraciously as he might. “This young man”—he indicated a bold bluff young mountaineer who was availing himself of the “standing-room only,” to which a number of the youths were relegated—“dug up this sprout at my request this afternoon, and hunted out a last year’s seed among the dead leaves on the ground.”
As his eyes met those of this young fellow the twinkle of mischievous delight in the mountaineer’s big blue orbs gave him a faint zest of returning relish for the situation, albeit the primitive denizens of the Cove had been all too well humbugged even for his own comfort.
“This pocket is torn,”—he thrust his hand into it,—“and has no bottom. I therefore slipped this wand into this pocket of these knickerbockers,” suiting the action to the word. “You see the leaves all fold together, so that its presence does not even mar the pronounced symmetry of my garments. Then I placed the seed, thus, and threw the cloth over the pail, thus; with my left hand I slipped out the persimmon shoot, and planted it, thus; and it was beneath the cloth that I left in a peak to give it air and to conceal it while I had the honor to entertain you by singing.”
He supposed that he would have satisfied even the most timorous and doubtful by this revelation of his methods and of the innocuous nature of his craft, but he could not fail to note the significantly shaken heads, the disaffected whispers, the colloguing of the young mountaineers occupying “standing-room only.”
“Ef he hed done it that-a-way at fust, I’d hev viewed it sure. I viewed it plain this time,” said one of these.
“He can’t fool me,” protested a sour-visaged woman who kept up a keen espionage on all the world within the range of her pink sunbonnet.
“One lie never mended another,” said the old preacher aside in a low voice to a presiding elder. “Potsherds, lies are, my brother; they hold no water.”
The juggler could deceive them easily enough, but alack, he could not undeceive them! He debated within himself the possibility which each of his feats possessed of exciting their ire, as he hurriedly rummaged in the drawer of the table. He closed it abruptly.