legerdemain

(I fear now) a little like a professor of legerdemain. David was sitting up, and he immediately fixed his eyes on me.

Not so the sailor, beholding the scenery of the Antarctic seas; where at times, by some infernal trick of legerdemain in the powers of frost and air, he, shivering and half shipwrecked, instead of rainbows speaking hope and solace to his misery, views what seems a boundless church-yard grinning upon him with its lean ice monuments and splintered crosses.

Every little while he would bend down and take hold of the edge of the blanket with the extreme tips of his fingertips, as if to show there was no deception--chattering away all the while--but always, just as I was expecting to see a wonder feat of legerdemain, he would let go the blanket and rise to explain further.

He already sang as nobody on this earth had ever sung before; he practised ventriloquism and gave displays of legerdemain so extraordinary that the caravans returning to Asia talked about it during the whole length of their journey.

But this kind of logical legerdemain will never counteract the plain suggestions of justice and common-sense.

The king hastened on board, expecting to find his sandal-wood converted into crapes and damasks, and other rich stuffs of China, but found, to his astonishment, by the legerdemain of traffic, his cargo had all disappeared, and, in place of it, remained a bill of charges amounting to three thousand dollars.

Out of the manifold events of his life, his deeds, his feelings, his thoughts, he might make a design, regular, elaborate, complicated, or beautiful; and though it might be no more than an illusion that he had the power of selection, though it might be no more than a fantastic legerdemain in which appearances were interwoven with moonbeams, that did not matter: it seemed, and so to him it was.

By some legerdemain the Admiral found that he was clutching in his right hand one of the obnoxious bills.

He had prosecuted his studies, also, under a traveling sage who united the mysteries of medicine with magic and legerdemain. His mind, therefore, had become stored with all kinds of mystic lore; he had dabbled a little in astrology, alchemy, divination;[2] knew how to detect stolen money, and to tell where springs of water lay hidden; in a word, by the dark nature of his knowledge he had acquired the name of the "High German Doctor," which is pretty nearly equivalent to that of necromancer.

With the collective Nepali mind weighed down by far more intricate political convolutions at virtually every turn, the RPP's linguistic legerdemain could only be comprehended as a guise for political unscrupulousness.

Wandering the labyrinth of the admiral's mental processes, he would stray into areas of divagation where wiles seemed to double back on themselves in self-defeating loops, a Byzantine legerdemain which brought to light nothing, nothing at all, save the suspicion that Canaris practised, like conjuring, a specious magic.

If by some legal legerdemain the demurrer is granted, the ex-senator who is out on bail for the supposedly nonbailable crime will see the charge going up in smoke and his P183-million plunder case dismissed.