it came
to seeing visions of a stunning and marketable sort I could get along
better without his help than with it. Then there was another thing:
Hicks wasn't worth a tallow dip on mute mental suggestion. Whenever
Simmons stood behind him and gazed at the back of his skull and tried to
drive a mental suggestion into it, Hicks sat with vacant face, and never
suspected. If he had been noticing, he could have seen by the rapt faces
of the audience that something was going on behind his back that
required a response. Inasmuch as I was an impostor I dreaded to have
this test put upon me, for I knew the professor would be "willing" me to
do something, and as I couldn't know what it was, I should be exposed
and denounced. However, when my time came, I took my chance. I perceived
by the tense and expectant faces of the people that Simmons was behind
me willing me with all his might. I tried my best to imagine what he
wanted, but nothing suggested itself. I felt ashamed and miserable,
then. I believed that the hour of my disgrace was come, and that in
another moment I should go out of that place disgraced. I ought to be
ashamed to confess it, but my next thought was, not how I could win the
compassion of kindly hearts by going out humbly and in sorrow for my
misdoings, but how I could go out most sensationally and spectacularly.

There was a rusty and empty old revolver lying on the table, among the
"properties" employed in the performances. On May-day, two or three
weeks before, there had been a celebration by the schools, and I had had
a quarrel with a big boy who was the school-bully, and I had not come
out of it with credit. That boy was now seated in the middle of the
house, half-way down the main aisle. I crept stealthily and impressively
toward the table, with a dark and murderous scowl on my face, copied
from a popular romance, seized the revolver suddenly, flourished it,
shouted the bully's name, jumped off the platform, and made a rush for
him and chased him out of the house before the paralyzed people could
interfere to save him. There was a storm of applause, and the magician,
addressing the house, said, most impressively--

"That you may know how really remarkable this is, and how wonderfully
developed a subject we have in this boy, I assure you that without a
single spoken word to guide him he has carried out what I mentally
commanded him to do, to the minutest detail. I could have stopped him at
a moment in his v