Modern Magic: A Practical Treatise on the Art of Conjuring

It is a good plan to perform the trick first without, and then to repeat it with, the aid of the money plate, making a great point in the second instance of the fact that you do not even touch the money, and accounting for the use of the plate as designed to preclude all possibility of the use of sleight-of-hand, or any other mechanical mode of deception. The spectators, having already seen you perform the trick without the aid of the plate, are precluded from supposing that this latter has any special connection with the secret; and seeing clearly that you have in this instance no coins concealed in your hands, naturally conclude that the same was the case on the former occasion. Thus the repetition of the trick, instead of assisting them to a solution, rather increases the mystery. The trick may be varied at pleasure so far as regards the manner of the disappearance of the coins which are supposed to be passed invisibly into the hands of the person holding the larger number. One mode is to ask one of the company to wrap them up in a piece of stiff paper, for which you forthwith secretly substitute a piece of similar paper, in which a like number of coins have been wrapped, but have been removed, the paper, however, retaining the form of the coins. Taking this in the left hand, you pretend to take from it, invisibly, with the finger and thumb of the right hand, each coin in succession, and to pass it in the same manner into the hand of the person holding the remaining coins, finally tearing the paper in half to show that they have really passed away from it. Or you may, if you prefer it, place the coins in question on the “vanishing plate,” to be hereafter described, whence they mysteriously disappear as you take them off one by one. This is a very effective mode. Or you may place them in the “plug-box,” the “Davenport cabinet,” or any other of the various appliances after-mentioned for vanishing money.