illusions to prove that he was the real "Original Chinese Conjurer". Soo accepted the challenge and agreed to meet Foo at the offices of The Weekly Dispatch for a press conference. When Ching Ling Foo realized that the press was not interested in Chung Ling Soo's real identity, he backed out of the press conference and the challenge. The episode was a public embarrassment for Ching Ling Foo, who remained at the Empire Theatre for only four weeks (Chung Ling Soo's engagement at the Hippodrome lasted three months). Soo's most famous illusion, partly because of his death while performing it, was called "Condemned to Death by the Boxers". In this trick, Soo's assistants, sometimes dressed as Boxers, took two guns on to the stage. Several members of the audience were called up to the stage to mark a bullet that appeared to be loaded into one of the guns. Attendants fired the gun at Soo, and he appeared to catch the bullets from the air and drop them on a plate he held up in front of him. Actually, Soo palmed the bullets, hiding them in his hand during their examination and marking. The muzzle-loaded guns were rigged so that the gunpowder charge fired in a chamber below the barrel so that the bullet never left the gun. Personal life Robinson married his assistant Bessie Smith on February 23, 1883. Shortly after the couple married, in December 1883, a woman with whom Robinson had been having an affair (possibly a young servant girl who worked for Robinson's parents) gave birth to his child, a girl named Annie. Robinson's parents took the child in and raised her. Robinson and Smith would later have a son, Elmore (born February 1885). After the birth of their son, Smith could no longer rehearse long hours and travel with Robinson as his assistant. He soon lost interest in his wife after meeting Olive "Dot" Path (born Augusta Pfaff), who would also become his assistant. As divorce was considered socially unacceptable at the time and Robinson was a Roman Catholic, he and Smith never formally divorced and simply decided to "cancel" their marriage. Robinson and Path presented themselves as husband and wife for the next twenty years. They eventually married in a civil ceremony in March 1906. The marriage was not legally recognized as Robinson was still married to Bessie Smith. Shortly after Robinson married Path,