Author Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1920 edition. Excerpt: ... THE AUTHOR (How he became a Magician) An Autobiography There was nothing remarkable about the advent into this world of the author of this book. He did not glide onto this mundane sphere through the medium of a meteor, neither was he a mere scintillating ray emanating from a lucky star; nor is he conscious of having been born under a lucky moon. He cannot boast of progenitors supernormally endowed by a mathematical phenomenon allotting to him a distinction to claim as a birth-right, inheritance of the seventh son of a seventh son. But, to the best of his knowledge and belief he came into this world in the conventional way by virtue of the stork, and that, without even so much as "a strawberry mark on his left arm," or the proverbial "silver spoon in his mouth." He was just born.* He is not aware of the exact moment of the event, neither can he vouch for the condition of the -Born in Prince Street, City of New York, September 9th, 1847. I natural elements which prevailed. He really does not know if Jupiter and Ajax were in conjunction at this time and combined forces to express wrath, or if they bent their energy to celebrate the evenful occasion in a befitting way with celestial pyrotechnics. His mind is not clear on these points. He does however, vividly recall the fact that the Year was the Forty-seventh in the NINETEENTH Century, and the Month was SEPTEMBER, the NINTH month of the year also, that by a strange coincidence, the day was the NINTH of the month, so; since NINE is in mathematical progression the multiple of the Mystic, Symbolic digit 3, it is possible that whatever faculty for, or predilection he had toward the Marvelous and the Mysterious may be due to abnormal development of his "bumps of Curiosity and...