a rope up which
the performer climbs from view of the spectators. I am not going to say
whether those are tricks or not. Their knowledge may be different from
mine, therefore I do not question it. I only propose to show you the
same kind of performance without the use of any coverings or
concealment, and leave you and these four gentlemen to discover any
deception on my part if you can. I will begin by giving you a new
version of the mango trick, if trick it is, with variations. Professor
Marmion, would you have the goodness to ask one of the young ladies to
bring me one of those beautiful white roses of yours?"

Franklin Marmion was on the point of saying: "I'll bring you one myself,
and see what you can do with it," but he was a sportsman in his way,
and, seeing that his guests were so far not all inclined to be
frightened at what they had seen, he refrained from spoiling the
"entertainment," as they evidently took it to be, and so he asked his
daughter to go and get one of her nicest Marechal Niels.

She rose from her chair and went to her favourite tree; Merrill followed
her with a ready penknife. They came back with a fine half-blown rose on
a leafy twig about nine inches long. As she held it out to Phadrig he
declined it with a bow and a wave of his hand, saying:

"I thank you, Miss Marmion, but it will be better for me not to touch
it. Some one might think that I had bewitched it in some way; will you
be kind enough to give it to Commander Merrill and ask him to put the
stem into the turf: about two inches down, please."

She handed the rose to Merrill, and as he took it their eyes met for an
instant, and she flushed ever so slightly. He, with many unspoken
thoughts, knelt down, made a little hole in the turf with his knife, and
planted the rose. When he stood up again Phadrig went on in the same
quiet impersonal voice:

"Now, ladies and gentlemen, you know that this rose is of a pale cream
colour slightly tinted with red. It shall now grow into a tree bearing
both red and white roses. It will not be necessary for me to touch it."

This somehow appealed more closely to such imagination as the majority
of the spectators possessed. They had regarded the other marvels they
had seen merely as bewilderingly clever examples of legerdemain: but for
a man to make a single sprig of rose grow into a tree bearing both red
and white roses without even touching it meant something quite
unbelievable--until they had seen