Chapter 12 - Page 2

him where he expected to go to if he did such
things.

Of telling him tales that had no moral application.

Of saying that the handkerchief disappeared into nothingness,
when it really disappeared into a small tin cup, attached to my
person by a piece of elastic.

To this last charge I plead guilty, for in those days I had a
pathetic faith in legerdemain, and the eyebrow feat (which,
however, is entirely an affair of skill) having yielded such good
results, I naturally cast about for similar diversions when it
ceased to attract. It lost its hold on David suddenly, as I was
to discover was the fate of all of them; twenty times would he
call for my latest, and exult in it, and the twenty-first time
(and ever afterward) he would stare blankly, as if wondering what
the man meant. He was like the child queen who, when the great
joke was explained to her, said coldly, "We are not amused," and,
I assure you, it is a humiliating thing to perform before an
infant who intimates, after giving you ample time to make your
points, that he is not amused. I hoped that when David was able
to talk--and not merely to stare at me for five minutes and then
say "hat"--his spoken verdict, however damning, would be less
expressive than his verdict without words, but I was
disillusioned. I remember once in those later years, when he
could keep up such spirited conversations with himself that he
had little need for any of us, promising him to do something
exceedingly funny with a box and two marbles, and after he had
watched for a long time he said gravely, "Tell me when it begins
to be funny."

I confess to having received a few simple lessons in conjuring,
in a dimly lighted chamber beneath a shop, from a gifted young
man with a long neck and a pimply face, who as I entered took a
barber's pole from my pocket, saying at the same time, "Come,
come, sir, this will never do." Whether because he knew too
much, or because he wore a trick shirt, he was the most
depressing person I ever encountered; he felt none of the
artist's joy, and it was sad to see one so well calculated to
give pleasure to thousands not caring a dump about it.

The barber's pole I successfully extracted from David's mouth,
but the difficulty (not foreseen) of knowing how to dispose of a
barber's pole in the Kensington Gardens is considerable, there
always being polite children hovering near who run after you and
restore it to you. The young man, again, had said that anyone
would lend me a bottle or a lemon, but though these were articles
on which he seemed ever able to lay his hand, I found (what I had
never noticed before) that there is a curious dearth of them in
the Gardens.