Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 31, 2025
Every little while he would bend down and take hold of the edge of the blanket with the extreme tips of his fingertips, as if to show there was no deception chattering away all the while but always, just as I was expecting to see a wonder feat of legerdemain, he would let go the blanket and rise to explain further.
"That's what I want," said Joe. "I can't afford to have my hands scratched, as I do some legerdemain tricks. But I need some soft-soled slippers more than I need gloves." "Here is a pair," said the woman. "They're mine. I wear large ones, for I like to be comfortable." "They'll fit me," decided Joe, after an inspection. "Just what I want, too!" He began to take off his shoes.
In a moment of weakness he permitted himself a course to which only so great an emergency could have prompted him. The situation was saved by a species of legerdemain of card-shuffling, so to speak which was quite outside the lines of mercantile morality, and barely inside the lines of legality itself.
Of old he would have said: "Well, the furniture is very old! I will buy new." But he was incapable now of literary legerdemain. Publishers, undermined by piracy, paid badly; the newspapers made close bargains with hard-driven writers, as the Opera managers did with tenors that sang flat.
It follows, therefore, that, if prepared slates are to be used, they must be adroitly substituted for others, which the sitters know to be clean. The question is thus narrowed to one of pure legerdemain, and the Medium must necessarily have several slates at hand. When two slates only are used, the prepared slate is usually lying on the table when the sitters take their seats.
Swung out of his peaceful orbit, by the legerdemain of death; no longer a humble steady star but a meteor; bumping as yet darkly against the planets; and then this monumental folly which had returned him to the old orbit but still in meteoric form, without peace or means of livelihood! An ass, indeed, if ever there was one.
In all his disguises he is still our ancestor. His story reads like a fairy book. Never did nimble fancy of childhood invent such transformations only the transformations are so infinitely slow, and attended with such struggle and suffering. Strike out the element of time and we have before us a spectacle more novel and startling than any hocus-pocus or legerdemain that ever set the crowd agape.
In winter the women told fortunes, the men showed tricks of legerdemain; and these accomplishments often helped to while away a weary or stormy evening in the circle of the 'farmer's ha'. The wildness of their character, and the indomitable pride with which they despised all regular labour, commanded a certain awe, which was not diminished by the consideration that these strollers were a vindictive race, and were restrained by no check, either of fear or conscience, from taking desperate vengeance upon those who had offended them.
There was trust in the plighted word of a chivalrous soldier like Alexander Farnese, of a most religious and anointed monarch like Philip II. English frankness, playing cards upon the table, was no match for Italian and Spanish legerdemain, a system according to which, to defraud the antagonist by every kind of falsehood and trickery was the legitimate end of diplomacy and statesmanship.
I never knew one of these legerdemain fellows, who pass their lives, as one may say, in dancing upon a tight rope, but what they came at length to caper at the end of one tchick." "My only concern is," said Trois Eschelles, looking upwards, "that the poor creature must die without confession."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking