We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
SHOWMAN
gling. It was intended to be one of the high points of the show— and it certainly was.
That was middling arduous, but hardly a patch on another lean season when, for lack of anything that paid better, I played "horse" for a hypnotist. Hypnotism acts were pretty popular back then and I must say that, in this case at least, the stage rushed in ahead where science was as yet afraid to tread for another twenty or thirty years. And "horse" was the technical name for the actor whom a stage hypnotist or mesmerist or magician used to hire to sit in the audience and volunteer to come up on the stage to be made a monkey of. That doesn't necessarily mean the hypnotist was a fake who needed a horse all the time. My boss, a former doctor whose professional name was Satanella, had the power all right. With luck he could find in the audience some chinless and staring individual who would hypnotize beautifully, with no fake about it, stretch out as stiff as a poker so he could be laid along the backs of two chairs with only his feet and neck supported. But he couldn't always count on finding a good subject and the horse was an ace in the hole. If possible, the horse would also be a real hypnotic subject. If one couldn't be hired, he would put up with somebody like me who, although he couldn't be hypnotized by Svengali himself, was quite willing to fake it for fifteen dollars a week— when I got it, which was seldom enough. We were a good act while we lasted. I faked hypnotism to the queen's taste. And Satanella, a slender, tall,
49