pages: latestmagicbeing00hoff.pdf, 229
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latestmagicbeing00hoff.pdf | 229 | THE USE OF THE WAND 213 hoist him up and drop him in the water-butt, or into the Red Sea, according to order. If the magician wanted a week at the seaside, he had no need to pay railway fare. The familiar would just pick him up, house and all, and land him gently in the middle of the mixed bathing. The only draw- back was that, sooner or later, a time came when there was no performance, because the magician had been carried off by his familiar on a pitchfork. "As the French say, nous avons changé tout cela, Familiars are as extinct as the dodo. Per- haps it's as well, but it makes it very much harder to be a magician. In the first place you must know all about astrology, anthropology, Egyptology and all the other ologies. You must be well posted in mathematics, hydrostatics, pneumatics and numis- matics. You must know all about clairvoyance, palmistry and thought reading, sympathy and antipathy, magnetism, mesmerism, wireless teleg- raphy, X rays and all the other kinds of rays. Of course you must be well up in Greek and Latin, and a little. Hebrew, not to mention a few other things which I forget for the moment, but I won't stop to think of them now. When you have stud- ied these little matters fourteen hours a day for nine or ten years, you will be as 'chock-full of science' as old Sol Gills himself, and you will be able to do all sorts of wonderful things, some of which I hope to show you this evening. "Before I begin, there is just one little matter |