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.
Of quite a different character are the jugglers with plates and bowls. Not only children, but many of a larger growth delight to watch these. Our only way of learning about them was to call them into our court as the Chinese call them to theirs, and that is what we did.
The performer first put a plate on the top of a trident and set it whirling. In this whirling condition he put the trident on his forehead where he balanced it, the trident whirling with the plate as though boring into his skull.
He next took a bamboo pole six feet long, with a nail in the end on which he set the plate whirling. The plate, of
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