“Well,” said my friend, slowly, dropping a new sleight-of-hand he was practicing, “you see, I was once young and a fool myself, and had to grow and develop; and the process was so tedious that I’m not apt to forget. And, somehow, I feel as if I should always keep young in spite of the years. There is always something to interest me, and that keeps me from growing old.”
“By the way,” I put in, “when did you begin conjuring? Such marvelous proficiency as yours can have been attained only by lifelong practice. Did you take it up deliberately, or drift into it by chance?”
My friend gazed soberly for a moment at the crackling cedar sticks in my adobe fireplace—he had come out to visit me in New Mexico—before replying.
“Do you know, this reminds me very strongly of my own early life. These Indians who are your neighbors, this simple way of life, recall old times. You might not believe it, but my own folks were nomad savages, and my infancy was passed among scenes compared to which your surroundings here are highly civilized. Yes, I don’t wonder you are astonished; in sober earnest, you cannot imagine how brutal and squalid were the surroundings. Nothing to wear, very little to eat, and that little always raw; in fact, not one of the conveniences which even an Indian now deems necessary to his existence. Why, we hadn’t even a way to warm ourselves; and as for houses or clothing, they were quite unknown. Education? Not a bit more than the monkeys have. I was nearly a grown man before I learned to read and write.”
“Why, you have risen even further than from rail splitter to president!”
“Ah, Lincoln got as high as man can get. We were very dear friends, and I believe I helped him materially in the great crises through which he was called upon to lead the nation. At any rate, he always consulted me before taking any important step.”
Now in any one else, this would have seemed the end of impudence and mendacity, if not half blasphemy. But when my friend the magician said it, I knew it must be true. He went on in his quiet way:
“But we were talking of my youth. You asked how and when I first took up conjuring. To tell the truth, I can hardly remember. I was certainly very young, and the discovery of my powers was quite accidental. One of my first tricks was very simple; but perhaps it was most important of all. It lifted my people from a lower plane than any savage now occupies, to high civilization. Every person every day uses that little invention of mine—and 99 per cent of them without stopping to thank the inventor. By simply taking two sticks and rubbing them together—this way—I produced a substance which had never been seen on earth before, but which is now the first absolute necessity in every household. If it were abolished, the world’s progress would stop. It’s a very curious substance. The materials of which it is composed are invisible and intangible; but it can be seen further and felt more than anything else in the world. You can’t touch it; and yet, here, if you could not sometimes almost touch it you would perish. You have to feed it as carefully as you would a horse, and much oftener; and, unlike any other laborer I know of, it will never work between meals. But while it eats, it will work like mad. Another queer thing about it is that it would live forever if you fed it forever; but it dies as soon as it stops eating. But you can bring it to life again in a minute, strong and active as ever. It is terribly mischievous, too; if you give it proper attention, it cuts up no pranks; but if you are careless, it sometimes sneaks off and does more damage in one short romp than a hundred men could replace by a lifetime’s earnings. Then it’s curious what a hatred it has for a still commoner substance which I didn’t invent. Bring the two together and there is a noisy and desperate fight, and one or other of the combatants is annihilated. Yet if you place them just near enough to each other, but so confined that they cannot grapple, they work together with an energy which I saw move a hundred buildings once—each building over thirty feet long. Ah, you wonder more at some of my other tricks, probably because you are less familiar with them; but I tell you that is just about the biggest single thing I ever did. There would have been neither geography nor history; we should never have heard of Cæsar or Napoleon or Washington or much of anybody else, if I hadn’t stumbled on that little secret of rubbing the sticks, while I was still what you might well call a green, awkward boy.”
“Yes,” I admitted, “I guess, after all, your fire trick is about the greatest thing of all—though I hadn’t just looked at it in that light before. Really, about every single thing we depend on depends on that. And that was about your first turn in magic?”
“Ye-es, perhaps the first important one. It was a great start, too, for after that I advanced pretty rapidly in proficiency, until I became, as you know, able to do pretty nearly whatever I try.”