Procure a good, large apple or turnip, and cut from it a piece of the shape to resemble the butt-end of a tallow candle; then from a nut of some kind—­an almond is the best—­whittle out a small peg of about the size and shape of a wick end.  Stick the peg in the apple and you have a very fair representation of a candle.  The wick you can light, and it will burn for at least a minute.  In performing you should have your candle in a clean candlestick, show it plainly to the audience, and then put it into your mouth, taking care to blow it out, and munch it up.  If you think best, you can blow the candle out and allow the wick to cool, and it will look, with its burned wick, so natural that even the sharpest eyes can not distinguish it from the genuine article.

Once, at a summer resort in Massachusetts, I made use of this candle with considerable effect.  While performing a few parlor tricks to amuse some friends, I pretended to need a light.  A confederate left the room, and soon returned with a lantern containing one of these apple counterfeits.

“Do you call that a candle?” I said.

“Certainly,” he replied.

“Why, there is scarcely a mouthful.”

“A mouthful?  Rather a disagreeable mouthful, I guess.”

“You have never been in Russia, I presume.”

“Never.”

“Then you don’t know what is good.”

“Good?”

“Yes, good.  Why, candle ends, with the wick a little burned to give them a flavor, are delicious.  They always serve them up before dinner in Russia as a kind of relish.  It is considered bad taste in good society there to ask a friend to sit down to dinner without offering him this appetizer.”

“The bad taste would be in the relish, I think.”

“Not at all.  Try a bit.”

I took the candle out of the lantern, and extended it toward my confederate, who shrank back with disgust.

“Well,” I said, “if you won’t have it, I’ll eat it myself.”  And so saying, I put it into my mouth and munched it up, amid the cries of surprise and horror of the assembled party.  Two old maids insisted on looking into my mouth to see whether it was not concealed there.

Having soaked a piece of thread in common salt water, tie it to a small finger-ring.  When you apply the flame of a candle to the thread it will burn to ashes and yet sustain the ring.

A DIFFICULT CIRCLE TO JUMP FROM.

Take a piece of chalk, and ask, if you make a circle, whether any boy standing in it thinks he can jump out of it.  As soon as one proposes to do so, bring him into the center of the room, draw a circle with the chalk around his jacket, and say, “Now jump out of it!”

AN IMPOSSIBLE WALK.

Ask one young lady in the company whether she thinks, if she clasped her hands, she could walk out of the room.  On her saying she could, request her to pass her arm round the leg of the table or piano, join her hands, and walk away.