The flower-pots may be introduced as follows:
“Permit me to call your attention to one of my latest improvements.
Conjurers have a foolish fancy, as I dare say you have noticed, for
borrowing other people’s hats. If a conjurer wants to collect money from
the air, he collects it in a hat. If he wants to make an omelette, he
cooks it in a hat. If he wants to hatch a few chickens, he does it in a
hat. And, for fear of accidents, he never uses his own hat, but always
borrows somebody else’s. It’s very wrong of us. As Sir William Gilbert
says, about some other forms of crime,
‘It’s human nature, P’raps. If so,
O! isn’t human nature _low_.’
But we all do it. The worst of it is, we get so in the way of borrowing
hats that we do it without thinking. You will hardly believe that one
evening I came away from the theatre with two hats. One of them was my
own. The other I had borrowed--from under the seat. You don’t believe it?
Well, I said you wouldn’t. I always know!
“But that is not all. It isn’t only the bad effect on the conjurer’s own
morals, and sometimes on the hat. People are so careless. They do leave
such funny things in their hats. Cannon balls and birdcages; babies’
socks and babies’ bottles; rabbits and pigeons, and bowls of fish, and
a host of other things. And just when you are going to produce some
brilliant effect, you are pulled up short by finding some silly thing of
that sort in the hat. It’s most annoying.
“So, after thinking it over, I made up my mind to do away with hats
altogether. Of course I don’t mean for putting on people’s heads, but so
far as conjuring is concerned, and it struck me that a pretty flower-pot,
like this, would form a capital substitute.” (Show as one, the combined
pots, inside and out.) “Much nicer than a hat, don’t you think? It is
prettier, to begin with, and then again, you can see right through it,
and make sure there is no deception. You see that at present the pot is
perfectly empty.
“But no! I scorn to deceive you. I am like George Washington, except that
I haven’t got a little axe. I cannot tell a lie. At least it hurts me
very much to do so, and I don’t feel well enough to do it now. No! It is
useless any longer to disguise it! The pot is _not_ really empty, for you
see here is another inside it.” (Produce second pot.) “You wouldn’t have
thought it, would you? In fact, you would never have known, if I hadn’t
told you.
“Of course I could keep on doing this all the evening, but there wouldn’t
be much fun in it, and no time would be left for anything else, so I will
proceed at once to make use of the pots for a little experiment with
cards.”
(Proceed with any trick for which the card mat may have been prepared.)
N. B. It will be taken for granted, in the description of tricks
dependent upon the use of the flower-pots, that these have been already
introduced, after the above or some similar manner.