The intervening years are all blotted out. I am young again, and have just returned to the old home, after witnessing an exhibition of magic by Wyman the Wizard at the town hall. To a boy fresh from the delights of the Arabian Nights this is a wonderful treat. My mind is agitated with a thousand thoughts. I, too, will become a conjurer, and hold the groundlings spellbound; bring bowls of goldfish from a shawl; cook puddings in a borrowed hat; pull rabbits from old gentlemen’s pockets. Dear old Wyman, ventriloquist as well as prestidigitateur, old-time showman, and the delight of my boyhood—what a weary pilgrimage you had of it in this world; wandering up and down, never at rest, traveling thousands of miles by stagecoach, steamboat, and railroad, giving entertainments in little villages {202} and towns all over the United States, and welcomed everywhere by happy children. The big cities you left to your more ambitious brethren. But what of that? You brought thereby more pleasure into humble lives than all of the old conjurers put together. Well have you earned your rest. Though your name is quite forgotten by the present generation, a few old boys and girls still hold you in loving remembrance. [Illustration: WYMAN, THE MAGICIAN. (From an Old Print, Ellison Collection.)] Wyman was born in Albany, N. Y., and was reported to be sixty-five years of age at the time of his death. Just when he went on the stage, I have been unable to ascertain. Mr. George Wood, who is now running a small curio shop on Filbert Street, Philadelphia, was for sixteen years Wyman’s manager. He afterwards went with Pharazyn and Frederick Eugene Powell. Thanks to my friend, Mr. C. S. Eby, who interviewed Mr. Wood during the summer of 1905, I have obtained a few facts concerning Wyman’s career. After giving exhibitions all over the United States in school houses and small halls, Wyman went abroad and brought back with him quite an outfit of apparatus, most of it purchased, I presume, from Voisin’s Repository in {203} Paris. Voisin was the only manufacturer of magical novelties in those days. About 1850 Wyman played in New York City under the management of P. T. Barnum. When the magician Anderson sold out, Wyman bought considerable of his paraphernalia, such as the “Magic Cauldron” (Phillippe’s old trick), the “Nest of Boxes,” “Aerial Suspension,” “Inexhaustible Bottle,” and “Gun Trick.” In 1867 Wyman started the “gift show” in connection with his magic entertainment, sometimes giving away building lots as a first prize. He introduced the Sphinx illusion in the South for the first time and made a tremendous hit. People would come twenty miles to see it. He had a wonderful memory, which he applied to a second-sight act. The articles were placed in a handkerchief by the boy who borrowed them and the professor managed to get one secret look at the collection. From his remembrance he would later describe the articles while they were held aloft still tied in the handkerchief.