The Magician's Own Book, or, the Whole Art of Conjuring / Being a complete hand-book of parlor magic, and containing over one thousand optical, chemical, mechanical, magnetical, and magical experiments, amusing transmutations, astonishing sleights and subtleties, celebrated card deceptions, ingenious tricks with numbers, curious and entertaining puzzles, together with all the most noted tricks of modern performers.

by George Arnold; Frank Cahill

Above seven thousand nine hundred and three;

But when they are halved, you'll find very fair

The sum will be nothing, in truth I declare.

40. GRAMMATICAL PUZZLE.

Let the rich, great, and noble, banquet in the festal halls,

And pass the hours away, as the most thoughtless revel;

Then seek the poor man's dreary home, whose very dingy walls

Proclaim full well to all how low his rank and level.

Take away one letter from a word in the above stanza, and substitute another, leaving the word so metamorphosed still a word of the English language; and, by that change, totally after the syntactical construction of the whole sentence, changing the moods and tenses of verbs, turning verbs into nouns, nouns into adjectives, and adjectives into adverbs, &c., and so make the entire stanza bear quite a different meaning from that which it has as it stands above.