HOW I MADE THE PARTY “GO”

Dominion, Volume 25, Issue 69, 15 December 1931, Page 22 (Supplement)

HOW I MADE THE PARTY “GO”

♦ ♦ » Last Christmas Molly and I gave a party, and to help entertain our guests, both children and grown-ups, I learnt a few simple little tricks. They “went down” so well that I am passing them on to you other dads, and I am sure you will find them useful. You do not need any conjuring skill for them —I haven’t any!—or any special apparatus. Some of them, I found, need a little practice and preparation beforehand, but that is all, and everything you want in the way of apparatus can be found in the house. SPINNING AN EGG

We had lots of fun with this one. I had made a little net bag of string, just large enough to hold an egg, and with a string attached. I produced this, with a fresh egg, and

invited each of the audience in turn to see how long they could make the egg spin in the net They were all surprised to find that it very soon stopped spinning, because the fluid In the egg checks the motion. I then put another egg In the net

and made It spin for quite a long time. The secret was that my egg was hardboiled ! THE NINE STARS. For this I gave everybody a piece of paper and a pencil, and told them to draw nine stars, as shown in a. Then I challenged them to draw four

lines, which between them would pass through all the stars, without lifting

the pencil from the paper, and without going over any line twice. They had great fun trying, but nobody hit on the correct 'solution, which is in b. CAN YOU READ IT? Then I wrote on a piece of paper this street beggar’s sign, -and invited anyone to read it.'

4flBo ■ . The answer is: “For (4) a week on end I ate (8) next to nothing W.” SEEING THROUGH A BOX. This one mystified everybody. I took a pack of cards, invited anyone to Shuffle them well, and. then, in full view of everybody, I put them face downwards in a “fifty” cigarette box that was standing, open, on the table. I closed the box, tapped it, and announced that I would name the top three cards in the pack. I named three

cards, opened the box, k and taking out the three top cards one by one s h owed that they were the ones I had men-

tioned. Actually, before starting the trick, I had taken .those three 'cards out of the pack, remembered what they were—this needs a little more practice than you might think—and put them face upwards in the open lid of the box. I covered them with another card, on the front of which I had pasted a piece of paper looktag exactly like the inside of the lid of the box; nobody guessed that they were not looking at the actual lid,, or that there, were cards behind it. When I shut the box and tapped the lid, the hidden cards fell down on top of the pack, and when the box was opened appeared to be part of those that had been previously shuffled. The back of the false lid, of course, looked like another card.