B923 <=> B925 [BTG XLII Beelzebub in America, p. 924]

“First of all, there must be prepared, according to any old recipe, already familiar to specialists in the business, a thousand bottles of liquid; precisely one thousand bottles must be prepared, because if there should be merely one bottle more or one bottle less, the incantation will not work.

“These thousand bottles must be placed on the floor and then, quietly beside them, a single bottle of any genuine alcoholic liquid existing anywhere there, must be placed and kept there for a period of ten minutes; at the end of which time, very slowly and quite indispensably, while scratching the right ear with the left hand, one must utter with certain pauses this said alcoholic incantation.

“Upon this, not only are the contents of all the thousand bottles instantly transformed into precisely that alcoholic liquid contained in the said single bottle, but every bottle of the thousand even acquires the same label borne by that one bottle of genuine alcoholic liquid.

“Among the conjuries of this unprecedented German Professor Kishmenhof, there are, as I learned, several indeed most amazing ones.

“This famous German professor, a specialist in this branch, started, as is said, ‘inventing’ these remarkable conjuries of his quite recently, that is to say, in the early years of the last great general European process of reciprocal-destruction there.

“When a food crisis supervened in his fatherland Germany, he, sympathizing with the plight of his compatriots, invented his first conjury, which consisted in the preparation of a very cheap and economical ‘chicken soup.’

“This first conjury of his is called German chicken soup, and its execution is likewise extremely interesting, namely, as follows:

“Into a very commodious pot, set on the hearth, common water is poured, and then a few very finely chopped leaves of parsley are strewn into it.