Winter Sports İn Switzerland — E F Benson

There is an amazingly silly proverb which quite mistakenly tells us that seeing is believing The most ordinary conjurer at a village entertainment will prove the falsity of this saying For who has not seen one of these plausible mountebanks put a watch into a top hat and after clearly smashing it into a thousand pieces with a pestle stir up the disintegrated fragments with a spoon and produce an omelette Or who is so unacquainted with the affairs of the village schoolroom at Christmas as not to have seen a solid billiard ball or a lively canary squeezed out of the side of a friend s head Such phenomena are by no means rare and occur periodically all over England The observer s eyes have told him that he has seen such things and the verb to see is merely a compendious expression to indicate that on the evidence of your eyes such or such a phenomenon has actually occurred But no one believes that the disintegrated watch has become an omelette though ocular evidence seeing insists that it has It was a conjuring trick And this leads me to the consideration of the phenomena on which this whole book is based