The trick may be introduced as follows:
“For the next surprise I have to show you we are indebted to the ancient alchemists. People regard them as back numbers nowadays, because they didn’t know anything about aeroplanes, or appendicitis, or income tax and such-like up-to-date luxuries; but they had a good many useful little secrets of their own. One of them was the recipe for what was called the Alkahest, a liquid which immediately dissolved anything it touched; from a gold watch to a set of fire-irons. The secret of making it has long been lost, and all that still exists of the liquid itself I have here in this bottle.”
The bottle is here brought forward and offered for inspection.
“Pretty colour, isn’t it? And it has a very delightful perfume.” (Takes out stopper.) “You are welcome to smell it but I don’t advise you to taste it. If you did you would probably never taste anything again. I want you to notice, by the way, those two letters H R on the label. There is a dead secret attached to those letters. They mean something, of course; but nobody knows what it is.”
The bottle is replaced on the table.
“This bottle came into my hands by inheritance. An ancestor of mine, in the reign of James the First, was an alchemist in a small way. He is reputed to have made a handsome income by selling ladies something to put in their husbands’ tea. History doesn’t say what. Let us hope it was only sugar. Well, this old gentleman managed to get hold of the recipe for making the Alkahest. Whether he found it out himself, or whether he cribbed it from the cookery-book of some other alchemist, I can’t say. Anyhow, he got it; and he made up some of the stuff and put it in that bottle.
“When he was just going to be burnt as a wizard, which was the regular thing with scientific men in those days, he handed the bottle to his eldest son, my great-great-grandfather seventeen times removed, saying, ‘Take it, my son, and may it do you more good than it has done me.’
“My great-great-grandfather took the bottle; but he had no idea what it contained. He was just going to ask his father what the letters on it meant, but just at that moment the old gentleman flared up, and it was too late. For the rest of his life my great-great-grandfather puzzled his head as to what those two letters H R stood for, but all he could think of was ‘horse-radish,’ and he knew it couldn’t be that.
“Since that the bottle has been handed down in our family for sixteen generations, till at last it came to the hands of my Uncle James, and he puzzled over those letters like the rest. Uncle James was a bit of a ‘nut,’ and prided himself on his fine head of hair, but in course of time he found he was getting a bit thin on the top, and it worried him. One day, thinking over the mysterious letters, an idea struck him. ‘H R!’ he exclaimed, ‘H R! why “Hair Restorer” of course, not a doubt of it! I’ll try it this very night.’ He did. He rubbed it in, and went to sleep quite happy, but when he tried to brush his hair in the morning there wasn’t any left to brush. The Alkahest had taken it all off, and left him as bald as a baby.
“He went to bed again, and ordered a wig, but before it could be sent home he caught such a cold in his head that he died. Just-sneezed-himself-away.”