“I will ask the pig,” said Comte, gravely. “Piggy, is the good woman asking a fair price for you?”
“Too much by half,” the pig seemed to reply. “I am measled, and she knows it.”
The woman gasped and stared, but she was equal to the occasion.
“Oh! the villain,” she exclaimed. “He has bewitched my pig! Police, seize the sorcerer!”
The bystanders rushed to the spot, but Comte slipped away as quickly as he could, and left the affair to the intelligence of the police.
On one occasion the possession of this strange power was the means of saving Comte’s life. He was denounced by some ignorant Swiss peasants in the neighborhood of Friburg, as a sorcerer, set upon and beaten with sticks, and was about to be thrown into a limekiln, when he raised such a horrible yell, which appeared to proceed from the kiln, that the fellows dropped him, and fled precipitately from the spot.
Miller, whose strange adventures and vicissitudes were related by himself in his “Life of a Sowman,” was a conjuror of the fair-frequenting class during the greater part of his varied life. He relates an amusing anecdote of a failure he once had in performing the common trick of cooking a pancake in a hat. He was performing before a private party at Kelso, and among the company was an elderly gentleman, who sat close to the operating table, and caused some discomposure to Miller and his attendant by the closeness of his observation of their motions, and the grimaces and chucklings in which he indulged whenever he discovered, or thought he had discovered, the mode in which any of the tricks were performed. The pancake trick is done by secretly introducing into the hat a ready cooked and hot pancake in a tin dish, and above this a gallipot. The batter is prepared, in sight of the spectators, in a similar gallipot, just as much smaller than the other as to fit closely into it. The contents of the smaller gallipot are poured into the larger one, and both are withdrawn together; and the conjuror, after pretending to cook the pancake over a lamp or candle, presents it on the tin dish.
Miller’s attendant was so much confused by the watching, grimacing, and chuckling of the old gentleman that he omitted to place the gallipot in the hat which a gentleman of the party had lent for the purpose, and Miller poured the batter upon the pancake before he discovered the omission. He was not so ready-witted as Robert-Houdin showed himself on similar occasions, nor was his attendant so equal to the emergency as the French conjuror’s ministering imp proved in the face of such a disaster. They could only stare in bewilderment at the spoiled hat until Miller, recovering from his confusion, confessed his failure, explained the manner in which the trick is done, and threw the blame upon the inquisitive and chuckling old gentleman.
Anderson, a juggler widely known in Europe as the “Wizard of the North,” during a provincial tour met with a strange adventure. One day, toward the conclusion of an engagement at Elgin, he visited Forres, a town twelve miles distant, to make arrangements for repeating his performance there, in the vicinity of the “blasted heath,” on which, according to tradition, Macbeth met the witches. Having made the requisite arrangements, he was directed by the printer to the residence of an elderly widow, who had apartments to let, which, proving suitable, were taken for one week.
“You’ll excuse me, sir,” said the widow when he was about to depart, “but I maun tell ye I’m a puir widow, and a’ that I hae to live by is what I get by lettin’ my apartments. Ither folk hae engaged ’em, saying I might expect ’em on a certain day; but they didna come, sae I was disappointed. It’s an old sayin’, that ‘burnt bairns dreed the fire.’ Ye are a stranger, although a decent lookin’ man, and ye may do the same; sae I hope ye winna object to pay half o’ the rent aforehand.”