ard and seating himself on the ground in his white dress and
tightened turban, the chief of the Indian Jugglers begins with tossing
up two brass balls, which is what any of us could do, and concludes with
keeping up four at the same time, which is what none of us could do to
save our lives, nor if we were to take our whole lives to do it in. Is
it then a trifling power we see at work, or is it not something next to
miraculous? It is the utmost stretch of human ingenuity, which nothing
but the bending the faculties of body and mind to it from the tenderest
infancy with incessant, ever anxious application up to manhood can
accomplish or make even a slight approach to. Man, thou art a wonderful
animal, and thy ways past finding out! Thou canst do strange things,
but thou turnest them to little account!--To conceive of this effort of
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 hairsbreadth, 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 round him
at certain intervals like the planets in their spheres; to make them
chase one another 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 if 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 o