THE CANDLE.
A narrow strip of card-board, bent into semicircular form and having a round hole cut in its centre, serves as a candlestick, and in this the candle is stood.
"You can readily see," continues the performer, "that there is absolutely no chance here to gall you—no apparatus of any kind. And now to begin."
He rolls the handkerchief between his hands, and then extending his closed right hand, while the left, also closed, goes behind his back, says: "I shall now cause the handkerchief which is in my right hand to pass invisibly into that candle. That will be a miracle, and a prerequisite for a miracle is faith. You must believe that the handkerchief is in my hand."
"But," whispers a sharp-eyed, keen-witted spectator, "the handkerchief is not there. He kept it in his left hand, and has thrust it into his coat-tail pocket."
Ah, suspicious mortal, how grievously mistaken you are! As Josh Billings has wisely said, "It's better not to know so much than to know so much that's not so." The performer opens his hand and shows that the handkerchief is still there.
Again he goes through the same manipulation, and again suspicion is aroused.
"Ah, ye of little faith!" he exclaims. "There is no need of concealing my hands for such a simple trick. See! I merely roll the handkerchief, so, between my hands"—suiting the action to the word—"and on opening them we find them empty, nothing concealed in them, and nothing up my sleeves," which he bares in proof. "Where has the handkerchief gone? It has passed, as I promised it would pass, into the candle."
"Should I cut open the candle," he goes on to say, "and in it find the missing bit of silk, you would conclude that I use a prepared candle. To prove this is not so I light the candle, and from its flame I thus extract the handkerchief." Which he does.