“He was buried on October 13th. I attended the funeral and laid two large wreaths on his grave; one on behalf of the Society of American Magicians, and the other from myself. The S. A. M. wreath was the largest and handsomest there. “Herr Frikell was 87 years old and had made all arrangements to live to 100. He always claimed he would live to over 100 years and would tell why he expected to reach that age. Too bad we could not have held a conversation ere he departed this life. “Sincerely yours, “HARRY HOUDINI.” Frikell was an innovator in the art of magic. He dispensed with apparatus. In his _Lessons in Magic_, he says: “The use of complicated and cumbersome apparatus, to which modern conjurers have become addicted, not only greatly diminishes the amount of astonishment they are enabled to produce,—a defect which is not compensated by the external splendor and imposing effect of such paraphernalia,—but the useful lesson, how fallible our senses are, by means the most ordinary and at everybody’s command, is entirely lost. It has been my object {185} in my performances to restore the art to its original province, and to extend that to a degree which it has, I believe, never yet hitherto reached. I banish all such mechanical and scientific preparations from my own practice, confining myself for the most part to the objects and materials of every day life. The success I have met with emboldens me to believe that I have followed the right path.” There is more or less truth in what Frikell says. But one can go to extremes in the avoidance of magic paraphernalia. The happy course is the middle one—a combination of sleight of hand and apparatus. I quote, as follows, from an article by Prof. Hoffmann (_Mahatma_): “The scientific school of conjuring, of which Robert-Houdin was the originator, had its drawbacks. It involved the use of costly and cumbersome paraphernalia, which grew and grew in quantity, till we find Anderson, the Wizard of the North, traveling with seven tons of luggage! Further, a trick, which, like Robert-Houdin’s automatic figures, obviously depends upon ingenious mechanism, palls upon the spectator. Such figures, at the present day, would be no more regarded as magic than the Strasburg clock. Lastly his electrical tricks produced an extraordinary effect, because very few persons in his day were acquainted with the properties of electricity, but now that there are electric bells in every household, and electrical motor cars in every street, its magical prestige exists no longer.