Page:The American Boy's Handy Book edition 1.djvu/343

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310
Winter.

piece of paper carefully, and they are all collected by some one, who, standing alongside the medium, presses the first paper folded on the medium's forehead, who with closed eyes immediately reads the contents out loud, and then verifies it by taking, opening, and re-reading it with his eyes open, and requests the writer to acknowledge it, after which the second paper is treated in a similar manner, thus continuing until every paper has been read and acknowledged. All this appears very wonderful and inexplicable to the uninitiated, but perfectly simple when explained. The party who collects the papers is the medium's confederate, and should be selected from among the guests some time before the game is proposed, and in another room be thoroughly drilled so as to make no mistakes. The confederate's part is very easy. It is simply to let the medium know what is to be written on his piece of paper, and be careful to leave that particular message for the last one to be read. On these two points depend the success of the experiment, for it makes no difference what the first message is. The medium reads out whatever the confederate was to write, and while pretending to verify it by re-reading with his eyes open, he really is fixing in his memory the lines in the first paper, which he reads out as the contents of the second message. The second is read as the third, and so on through them all. The confederate's message, which was read out as coming first, being the last, brings them out even.

A Literary Sketch Club

is a new idea, which has been tried and has proved very successful, the original club having prospered through three winters, and still boasts of some thirty enthusiastic members. The idea of the club is that each member illustrate the same subject (previously selected) in any way he thinks fit—the artists, if there be any present, by a drawing or painting on the subject;