Page:The Chinese Boy and Girl.djvu/164

Rh I discovered that with the last mouthful of paper he put in a small roll, the centre of which he started by puffing, and this he pulled out in a long tube. He did it with so many groanings and with such pain in the region of the stomach, that attention was directed either to his stomach or the roll, and taken away from his mouth.

"I shall eat these needles," said he, as he held up half a dozen needles, "and then eat this thread, after which I shall reproduce them."

He did so. He grated his teeth together causing a sound much like that of breaking needles. He pretended to swallow them, working his tongue back and forth in his tightly closed mouth, after which he drew forth the thread on which all the needles were strung.

He had a number of small white bone needles which he stuck into his nose and pulled out of his eyes, or which he pushed up under his upper lip and took out of his eyes or vice versa. How he performed the above trick I was not able to discover. He seemed to put them through the tear duct, but whether he did or not I cannot say. How he got them from his mouth to his eyes unless he had punctured a passage beneath the skin, is still to me a mystery.

His last trick was to swallow a sword fifteen inches long. The sword was straight with a round point and dull edges. There was no deception about this. He was an old man and his front, upper teeth were badly worn away by the constant rasping of the not over-smooth sword. He simply put it in his mouth, threw back his head and stuck it down his throat to his stomach.