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Deodota, an Italian Magician, was also a sword-swallower of more than average ability. He succumbed to the lure of commercialism finally, and is now in the jewelry business in the "down-town district" of New York City. Sword-swallowing may be harmlessly imitated by the use of a fake sword with a telescopic blade, which slides into the handle.
Violet looked grimmer than ever, so that I judged her struggles with her mundane consciousness to have been exceptionally severe. Captain Magnus seemed even beyond his wont restless, loose-jointed and wandering-eyed, and performed extraordinary feats of sword-swallowing. Mr. Shaw was very silent, and his forehead knitted now and then into a reflective frown.
In sword-swallowing and knife-throwing, the natives of the Flowery Kingdom are without rivals, and the uninitiated spectator can never understand how a man can make a breakfast of Asiatic cutlery without incurring the risk of dyspepsia.
On one occasion, while sword-swallowing before a Boston audience, a sword pierced a vein in her throat. The blade was half-way down, but instead of immediately drawing it forth, she thrust it farther. She was laid up in a hospital for three months after this performance. In Chicago she had a still narrower escape.
Thus we find them resorting to the allied arts of poison-eating, sword-swallowing and the stunts of the so-called Human Ostrich.
The following anecdote from the Carlisle Journal, shows that playing with sword-swallowing is about as dangerous as playing with fire.
There are many cases on record in which injury of the stomach has been due to some mistake or accident in the juggling process of knife-swallowing or sword-swallowing. The records of injuries of this nature extend back many hundred years, and even in the earlier days the delicate operation of gastrotomy, sometimes with a successful issue, was performed upon persons who had swallowed knives.
The present chief of the dangerous "profession" of sword-swallowing is Chevalier Cliquot, a French Canadian by birth, whose major trick is to swallow a real bayonet sword, weighted with a cross-bar and two 18-pound dumbbells. He can swallow without difficulty a 22-inch cavalry sword; formerly, in New York, he gave exhibitions of swallowing fourteen 19-inch bayonet swords at once.
They weren't swells, of course, and plenty of 'em made plenty of mistakes I've seen stunts done with a common table-knife that had the best of the sword-swallowing gents skinned a mile but I wasn't a fool, and I learned some.
Smith's Supreme Digestive Pellets he had given them a more than fair trial. Blenkinsop's Liquid Life-Giver he had drunk enough of it to float a ship. Perkins's Premier Pain-Preventer, strongly recommended by the sword-swallowing lady at Barnum and Bailey's he had wallowed in it. And so on down the list. His interior organism had simply sneered at the lot of them.
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