English tricks for Russian children

Something for Children’s Book Week: Magic Tricks.  By the six-year-old Samuel Hopkins (Moscow, 1911), published as a supplement to Svetliachok (“The Little Glow-worm”), a pre-Revolutionary children’s magazine aimed at 4–8-year-olds.  It recounts the conjuring abilities of a six-year-old English boy, Samuel Hopkins, with illustrated descriptions of some of his tricks so that the young reader might ‘pleasantly while away a winter’s evening’.

I was unable to discover whether Samuel Hopkins really existed.  The Magic Circle certainly has no record of him.