The Arkansaw traveler., 1888-04-21

clOSe-cropped, VelVety grass slopes gently from the French windows to the rivers brim, picked out with brilliant flower beds; and the villa and its grounds are the property of Major Irvine, Dicks uncle, who spends there each summer, surrounded by a small but festive party of young peo- pie.
 Thither in August came our artist, with camera, lens, tripod, and the hundred and one accessories which make up 6 photographers impedi- menta. He had been at "his dirty tricks" Gas Jack Irvine delighted in stigmatizing the artistic processes) for year by this time, and could take more or less instantaneous picture with more than tolerable precision and certainty; and he had determined to immortalize in his album every weir, loch, reach, and island, of Father Thames ere September drove him north again. But, though the amateur loves best bold landscape effects for his lens, fate and his familiar friend so rule it that groups-portrait groups almost invariably obtain an unde- sirable precedence. For in the matter of groups it does seem that the anna teur photographers lot is, to use the mildest phrase, a thankless one. He either fiatters his friends, and achieves thereby a certain ephemeral popu- larity-which is, at best, cheap-or he does not flatter them, in which case he is covered with unmerited odium under any circumstances extremely nasty.
 Dick hated taking groups. When he had hooded himself in the velvet fo- cussing -cloth, and wore the professor ial spectacles and the preoccupied, ar- tistic air-when he stood, watch in hand, waiting to take the cap off the lens-it irked him not little that Jack Irvine must needs seize the op- portunity to play the common buf- foon. It is we'll known that no nerves are SO easily excited as the collective risible nerves of group posed before the camera under such circumstances and idiot can evoke roars of laughter from a group of usually sane persons, and that with the most contemptible apology for a joke. Poor Dick would join feebly in the laugh that stayed his hand on the very brink of "expos- ure," but it jared terribly on his ar- tistic temper. Though none could be more frivolous than he when photog- raphy was not in question, he felt frivolity on such occasions to be not only out of place, but degradation to both art and artist. He would have dearly loved to tell Jack, in good nervous English, what he thought of him; but the presence of the girls precluded even that spice of satisfac- tion, and it seemed too trifiing mat ter to mention in cold blood after wards, over their pipes. Dick excused himself from the uncongenial task on every plea. In the first place, his lens was only landscape lens, he said, and not well adapted to any other kind of photography; in the second place, groups were the most difficult things even with proper lens. But no; groups only, and plenty of them, were insisted on, and by dint of coercion obtained. Groups at tennis, groups at tea, groups in the boat, fancy dress groups, groups CD to61eau, groups at every hour aud ill every costume. If the party chanccd to be dull, or tired, or from other causes unequal to the task of amusing each other, Dick was called upon to administer his infalli-
 ble somebody, of course, coming down with handsome sug- gestion for new and original pose.
 On the other hand, Dick objected
 less to taking single portraits. To
 take a single portrait he would "lead
 his victim" Gas that ass Jack said) "to a lonely place." where, however, after the most elaborate selection and ar engagement of light, shade, background and pose, a successful negative-if not satisfactory portrait; who is ever satisfied with his portrait?-was gen.
 erally obtained.
 |. But one there was whom Dicks ar-
 tistic soul coveted-as & model; one !, who turned deaf ear to the voice of his solicitations, charmed he never so wisely. And that was his cousin Mays schoolfellow, Elsie Keswicke. She was the worst offender in every group; she was an intolerant tease , during the progress of the important after-processes of developing, print l ing and toning, and it was she alone who dared to clap tiny pink palm over the aperture of the lens while he was focusing, causing thereby total eclipse of the inverted image on the ground glass. Of course, she system- , atically "came out" as badly as possi. ble-that was but part of her policy of evaporation. And yet it is sol emn fact that, from the very first, Dick would have exchanged his com plete apparatus for the qualification of obtaining one good negative of