unt!

To conceive of this extraordinary dexterity, distracts the imagination and
makes admiration breathless. Yet it costs nothing to the performer, any
more than if it were a mere mechanical deception with which he had nothing
to do, but to watch and laugh at the astonishment of the spectators. A
single error of a hair's breadth, of the smallest conceivable portion of
time, would be fatal; the precision of the movements must be like a
mathematical truth; their rapidity is like lightning.

To catch four balls in succession, in less than a second of time, and
deliver them back so as to return with seeming consciousness to the hand
again; to make them revolve around him at certain intervals, like the
planets in their spheres; to make them chase each other like sparkles of
fire, or shoot up like flowers or meteors; to throw them behind his back,
and twine them round his neck like ribbons, or like serpents; to do what
appears an impossibility, and to do it with all the ease, the grace, the
carelessness imaginable; to laugh at, to play with the glittering
mockeries, to follow them with his eye as if he could fascinate them with
its lambent fire, or as if he had only to see that they kept time with the
music on the stage--there is something in all this which he who does not
admire may be quite sure he never really admired anything in the whole
course of his life. It is skill surmounting difficulty, and beauty
triumphing over skill. It seems as if the difficulty, once mastered,
naturally resolved itself into ease and grace, and as if, to be overcome
at all, it must be overcome without an effort. The smallest awkwardness or
want of pliancy or self-possession would stop the whole process. It is the
work of witchcraft, and yet sport for children.

Some of the other feats are quite as curious and wonderful--such as the
balancing the artificial tree, and shooting a bird from each branch
through a quill--though none of them have the elegance or facility of the
keeping up of the brass balls. You are in pain for the result, and glad
when the experiment is over; they are not accompanied with the same
unmixed, unchecked delight as the former; and I would not give much to be
merely astonished without being pleased at the same time. As to the
swallowing of the sword, the police ought to interfere to prevent it.

When I saw the Indian juggler do the same things before, his feet were
bare, and he had large rings on his toes, which he kept