“Can _you_ read a man’s thoughts?” asked the reporter.
“Yes,” I replied boldly; “given certain conditions, I can.”
The reporter sniffed incredulously. I pretended to get huffed.
“Look here!” I burst forth, as though struck by a sudden inspiration. “In order to prove to you that I can read yours, I am willing to submit to a test; the most drastic, almost, that it is possible to conceive. You shall take some small article and hide it in any part of the city you like, and I will go to where you have hidden it, and find it. Moreover, I will allow you to blindfold me in such a manner that it is impossible for me to see to find my way to the spot where you have hidden the object, even if I knew where the locality was or in which direction it lay. All I ask is that you shall walk behind me and mentally direct me which way to go. You must fix your whole attention on the quest, that is to say, and exert all your will-power to guide me aright. This is all I ask. The rest is my business. There will be no word spoken between us, no questions asked or answered, and, of course, no personal contact. In fact, I should prefer that you remain always at some distance behind me; say, for instance, five or six paces.”
The sequel to the above conversation came a week later, when on February 5th, 1907, I found a stylograph pen which had been previously hidden by the reporter in the axle of one of the old Russian guns on Brandon Hill. Of course the affair was well boomed beforehand--I saw to that--and fully three thousand people (according to the report in the _Evening Times_ of the above date) were on the hill when I made the discovery, while a crowd of at least two thousand watched my start from the Prince’s Theatre, after my eyes had been tightly bandaged with a dark blue silk handkerchief folded in ten thicknesses, and stitched together to prevent any slipping. The width of this bandage was about four inches, completely covering my eyes, and, in order to make assurance doubly sure, I had each eye covered under the bandage with a separate pad of cotton-wool, pressed well down into the sockets.
Thus blindfolded I groped and blundered my way along several streets. Once I ran into a tramcar. Four times I fell down. But--I found the pen. And so delighted were the crowd at my success, that they seized me and carried me shoulder high to the Prince’s Theatre. The full report of the affair, as published in the newspaper, occupied over a column; and the reporter professed himself completely puzzled as to how I accomplished the feat, as indeed doubtless he was.