"Can you do it?" asked the sleight-of-hand performer, as he rolled a little red ball between his finger and thumb, pitched it up, caught it as it came down, half closed his hand and blew into it, opened his hand and the ball had disappeared.
He picked up another ball, tossed it up, caught it in his mouth, dropped it into his hand, and it mysteriously disappeared.
The juggler was seated on the ground with a piece of blue cloth spread out before him, on which were three cups, and five little red wax balls nearly as large as cranberries.
He continued to toss the wax balls about until they had all disappeared. We watched him closely, but could not discover where they had gone. He then arose, took a small portion of my coat sleeve between his thumb and finger, began rubbing them together, and by and by, one of the balls appeared between his digits. He picked at a small boy's ear and got another of the balls. He blew his nose and another dropped upon the cloth. He slapped the top of his head and one dropped out of his mouth, and he took the fifth from a boy's hair.
He then changed his method. He placed the cups' mouths down upon the cloth, and under one of them put the five little balls. When he placed the cup we watched carefully; there were no balls under it. When he raised it up, behold, there were the five little balls.
He removed the cups from one place to another, and asked us to guess which cup the balls were under, but we were always wrong.
There was a large company of us, ranging from children of three to old men and women of seventy-five, and from Chinese schoolboys to a bishop of the church, but none of us could discover how he did it.
Later, however, I learned how the trick was performed. As he raised the cup with his thumb and forefinger, he inserted two other fingers under, gathered up all the balls between them and placed them under the cup as he put it down. While in making the balls disappear, he concealed them either in his mouth or between his fingers.
The Chinese have a saying:
In selecting his balls from north to south,
The magician cannot leave his mouth;
And in rolling his balls, you understand,
He must have them hidden in his hand.