A Hat Load
By Birch

AFTER the magician has produced a few dozen handkerchiefs, a paper coil or a few big foulards, it is easy enough to get extra loads in the hat under cover of the first production. The difficulty has always seemed to me to be to make the first load satisfactorily.

The following method I have used for a long time, and it is so natural that the audience has no idea that a' load was made. At the beginning of the trick I pick up a closed opera hat with my right hand. In my left hand I hold by my thumb a load of spring flowers. The number of flowers to be used must be found by experimentation. You will want enough flowers, when opened, to make a heaping hatful. I snap the hat open with my right hand, and hold it up so that it may be seen to be empty. I then transfer it to my left hand, catching hold of the hat with my thumb on the outside of the brim, and my fingers and the load inside the hat. Then attention is called to the bottom of the hat, which I tap with the fingers of my right hand. While holding the hat up in the air, crown down. I let go of the flowers. My assistant walks on the stage with a basket. I take it and pour the flowers into it. I manage to spill one or two on the floor. I notice the error and look down while my assistant picks them up and drops them in the basket. Just as I look down and my assistant stoops, my right hand brings the bottom of the basket over the hat for a fraction of a second and my first real load is made.

The basket is specially prepared. It is seven inches high and seven inches in diameter at the top. The sides taper so that the bottom Is five and a half inches in diameter. The real bottom, however, is three inches from where the bottom would naturally be. My load is held under this false bottom by three clips, two of them stationary, the other movable. The movable clip has an arm which extends four or five inches up the side of the basket and is held in place by a spring. A slight pressure on this arm and the load is released from the basket. I use a five-inch paper coil as the bottom of the load and have silks, or whatever else I plan to produce, packed on the coil. Of course it is possible, but I have never found it necessary, to have a removable reed bottom for the basket. It is easier to remember to keep the bottom away from the audience.

If a magician does not use an assistant. he could momentarily set the basket on top of the hat, while he stooped to pick up the flowers himself.

In order to have the basket attract no attention it must not be decorated in any way, but rather be the kind of a basket one would take out in the garden to fill with flowers. I had my basket woven specially with the false bottom made right into the basket. This is not expensive and is well worth while.