h a piece of blue cloth spread
out before him, on which were three cups, and five little red wax balls
nearly as large as cranberries.

He continued to toss the wax balls about until they had all
disappeared. We watched him closely, but could not discover where they
had gone. He then arose, took a small portion of my coat sleeve between
his thumb and finger, began rubbing them together, and by and by, one
of the balls appeared between his digits. He picked at a small boy's
ear and got another of the balls. He blew his nose and another dropped
upon the cloth. He slapped the top of his head and one dropped out of
his mouth, and he took the fifth from a boy's hair.

He then changed his method. He placed the cups' mouths down upon the
cloth, and under one of them put the five little balls. When he placed
the cup we watched carefully; there were no balls under it. When he
raised it up, behold, there were the five little balls.

He removed the cups from one place to another, and 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 course, had a small
in