2. FOR SMALL LOADS
Preparation. Make up a load of about one hundred flowers and secure it with a band of green tissue paper passed around the bundle twice. Gum the end of the band and under it pass a black thread. Tie this round the green hand, leaving one end about nine inches long and cutting the other end off short.
Take two pieces of stiff white paper, twenty-four inches square, and paste them together with three inches of the black thread between them at the middle of one side. When the paper is held up, the bundle of flowers will hang six inches below the bottom edge. Dry the sheets under pressure.
1st Method. To prepare for the trick, lay the sheet on your table so that the load lies at the back on a small wire shelf. Stand behind the table and lift the paper by the two front corners to show the lower side. Show it clear of the table by about three inches at the bottom. Lay it down again flat and smooth it with your hands, a plausible excuse for putting it down; then lift it by the rear corners, thus raising the load behind it. Twist the paper into a cone around the load, hold the apex in the left hand, insert the right hand (under pretense of finishing off the cone) and break the band round the flowers.
After the pantomime catching of flowers in the air and the throwing into the cone, shake them out into the parasol. An easy method of getting a second load is to have it clipped behind a ribbon bow on the handle of the parasol. It is taken in the left hand in the action of holding the parasol steady while the first load is poured out of the cone. This second load is introduced by grasping the cone at the mouth with the left hand to show it empty.
2d Method. In another method a wire clip is used to hold the flowers together, and, projecting at the back of this, is a small lug by means of which the load can be clipped onto the back of the hand. Thus arranged, the first load is placed under the paper at the rear left corner. In picking up the sheet, with your right side to the spectators, clip the load of flowers at the back of the left hand between the second and third fingers. The palm of the left hand is thus seen to be empty and the right hand, which then forms the cone over the left hand, is also palpably empty.
Under cover of the surprise caused by the appearance of the first flowers, a second load can be secured in the same way and inserted under cover of removing the last few flowers of the first load.
3d Method. There is another method in which the cone is self-contained and the loading is avoided. Take two large sheets of dark brown wrapping paper and paste them together after the fashion of the cone for vanishing a silk handkerchief (see page 80). In the open space put three loads of fifty flowers, fastened with bands of green tissue. Show the paper on both sides, make the cone, open the double part under pretense of smoothing the inside, and the rest follows.
Finally, granting that the load has been made imperceptibly, the effect of the trick depends entirely on the operator. If the pretended catching of the flowers is done gracefully, to appropriate music, the subsequent welling forth of apparently innumerable blossoms is a very beautiful thing.
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