Part 21

One of them stood on two benches a foot high, put a handkerchief on the ground, and bending backwards, picked it up with his teeth.

The two boys then clasped each other around the waist, as in the illustration, and each threw the other back over his head a dozen times or more.

Exit the bear show with the boy acrobats, enter the old woman juggler with her husband who beats the gong.

This was one of the most interesting performances I have ever seen in China, perhaps because so unexpected.

The old woman had small, bound feet. She lay flat on her back, stuck up her feet, and her husband put a crock a foot in diameter and a foot and a half deep upon them. She set it rolling on her feet until it whirled like a cylinder. She tossed it up in such a way as to have it light bottom side up on her "lillies," in which position she kept it whirling. Tossing it once more it came down on the side, and again tossing it she caught it right side up on her small feet, keeping it whirling all the time.

My surprise was so great that I gave the old woman ten cents for performing this single trick.

The tricks of sleight-of-hand performers are well-nigh without number. Some of them are easily understood,--surprising, however, to children--and often interesting to grown people, while others are very clever and not so easily understood.

Instead of the hat from which innumerable small packages are taken, the Chinese magician had two hollow cylinders, which exactly fit into each other, that he took out of a box and placed upon a cylindrical chest, and from these two cylinders--each of which he repeatedly showed us as being without top or bottom and empty--he took a dinner of a dozen courses.

He called upon the baker to bring bread, the grocer to bring vegetables, and after each call he took out of the cylinders the thing called for. He finally called the wine shop to bring wine, and removing both cylinders, he exposed to the surprised children a large crock of wine.

As he brought out dish after dish, the children looked in open-mouthed wonder, and asked papa, mama or nurse, where he got them all, for they evidently were not in the cylinders. But papa saw him all the time manipulating the crock in the cylinder which he did not show, and he knew that all these things were taken from and then returned to this crock, while instead of being full of wine, he had only a cup of wine in a false lid which exactly fitted the mouth of the crock, and made it seem full.

When he had put away his crock and cylinders, he produced what seemed to be two empty cups.

He presented them to us to show that they were empty, then putting them mouth to mouth, and placing them on the ground, he left them a moment, when with a "presto change," and a wave of the hand, he removed the top cup and revealed to the astonished children and some of the children of a larger growth, a cup full of water with two or three little fish or frogs therein.

On inquiry I was told that he had the under cup covered with a thin film of water-colored material, and that as he removed the top cup he removed also the film which left the fish or frogs exposed to view.

This same juggler performed many tricks of producing great dishes of water from under his garments, the mere enumeration of which, might prove to be tiresome.

I was walking along the street one day near the mouth of Filial Piety Lane where a large company of men and children were watching a juggler, and from the trick I thought it worth while to invite him in for the amusement of the children. He promised to come about four o clock, which he did.

He first proceeded to eat a hat full of yellow paper, after which, with a gag and a little puff, he pulled from his mouth a tube of paper of the same color five or six yards long.

This was very skillfully performed and for a long time I was not able to understand how he did it. But after awhile I discovered that with the last mouthful of paper he put in a small roll, the centre of which he started by puffing, and this he pulled out in a long tube. He did it with so many groanings and with such pain in the region of the stomach, that attention was directed either to his stomach or the roll, and taken away from his mouth.

"I shall eat these needles," said he, as he held up half a dozen needles, "and then eat this thread, after which I shall reproduce them."

He did so. He grated his teeth together causing a sound much like that of breaking needles. He pretended to swallow them, working his tongue back and forth in his tightly closed mouth, after which he drew forth the thread on which all the needles were strung.

He had a number of small white bone needles which he stuck into his nose and pulled out of his eyes, or which he pushed up under his upper lip and took out of his eyes or vice versa. How he performed the above trick I was not able to discover. He seemed to put them through the tear duct, but whether he did or not I cannot say. How he got them from his mouth to his eyes unless he had punctured a passage beneath the skin, is still to me a mystery.

His last trick was to swallow a sword fifteen inches long. The sword was straight with a round point and dull edges. There was no deception about this. He was an old man and his front, upper teeth were badly worn away by the constant rasping of the not over-smooth sword. He simply put it in his mouth, threw back his head and stuck it down his throat to his stomach.

Small feet of the Chinese woman.

STORIES TOLD TO CHILDREN

One hot summer afternoon as I lay in the hammock trying to take a nap after a hard forenoon's work and a hearty lunch, I heard the same old nurse who had told me my first Chinese Mother Goose Rhymes, telling the following story to the same little boy to whom she had repeated the "Mouse and the Candlestick."

She told him that the Chinese call the Milky Way the Heavenly River, and that the Spinning Girl referred to in the story is none other than the beautiful big star in Lyra which we call Vega, while the Cow-herd is Altair in Aquila.

THE HEAVENLY RIVER, WITH THE PEOPLE WHO DWELL THEREON.

Once upon a time there dwelt a beautiful maiden in a quiet little village on the shore of the Heavenly River.

Her name was Vega, but the people of China have always called her the Spinning Maiden, because of her faithfulness to her work, for though days, and months, and years passed away, she never left her loom.