I am a photographic artist. To prevent peo- | ple from forming a mistaken conception of me, I may as well state at once that I do not pride myself on being an artist-that, in fact, I consider that term, as applied to myself, all fudge! I am a photographer, and not a bad one. If you want clear, sharp, brilliant pictures, I am the man for you. As for being an artist, I may confess here (nobody will know me) that I had much rather not be an artist. I should be very much ashamed of myself if I turned out such disgraceful smudges as artists delight in !

There was a man named Cox, a water-colour painter-perhaps my readers may have heard of him. Well, a lot of his pictures were exhibited in London some few years ago, and a friend of mine-one of our profession who sticks up for being an artist, and who does the art-articles in the "Photographic Dial"-this friend of mine persuaded me to go with him and see them. I think people are mad. To hear the ladies cry out "How sweetly pretty!" and the gentlemen "What broad handling ;" and my friend "What keeping! what aerial perspective! what chiaroscuro !" I couldn't help thinking at first it was some farce they were all acting, or that they had plotted together to take me in and laugh at But they really did it all as gravely as people go through the kneeling and the standing and the sitting at church. Some of them actually spoke out from the heart! I watched them, and saw it was not sham-for them I should prescribe strait-waistcoats!

me.

These pictures of Cox's (will you believe it?) were things of which I could make neither head nor tail. You might have turned every one of 'em upside down and it would have looked just as well! The very paper on which they were painted was a lot of odd scraps pasted together -the coarsest stuff I ever saw in my life; full of chopped straw, and as rough as a nutmeggrater! The colouring reminded me exactly of the blotting-paper on which I dry my plates out of the bath! It was nothing but a lot of dirty greys and greens and reds run into one another just as it happened! Now this Cox, they tell me, was a great artist-then I say I don't want to be an artist.

Just another instance of what an artist is, and I will begin my story. I went to the Brompton Boilers the other day. What I went for was to see the photographs with which Government is so shamefully underselling us. When I had done with those, however, I thought I would just take a turn round the building to see what was to be seen there; and I hit, first thing, upon

the painting gallery. I don't mean to say there were not some pretty enough pictures in it. There were a good many of Landseer's dogs-I have nothing to say against them: but at last I came into a room the walls of which were all aflame. I rubbed my eyes; but I am generally quick at accounting for things, and I soon made up my mind what was the truth of the matter. I had seen in a long line of cases, down below, articles of food and their adulterations. There was coffee and roasted corn, chicory and dandelion roots, and hundreds of things besides. Well, I got it into my head that this was the art-adulteration room. These, I thought, are hung up as a caution to the public! They may see here what bad art is, and guard against it when they furnish their houses. It seemed to me a good notion, and I amused myself by looking at specimen after specimen. All the Plagues of Egypt were there. I thought these names were fanciful ways of alluding to particular defects and tricks. My friend, the writer for the "Phot. Dial," has some books written by a man named Ruskin, which I could never make head or tail of; but I had learnt, from opening them now and then, that this polite way of insinuating one thing by calling it another was a grand high-art dodge. I remembered the Seven Lamps of Architecture, and so knew very well what kind of meaning the Nine Plagues of Egypt might have. While I was looking at one after another, a man with moustachios and a beard came up to me. I mistook him at first for one of us. I think he mistook me (I also wearing a beard and moustachios) for a painter, which he turned out to be.

"I see, sir," he said, with a flourish of his hand, "that you, too, are worshipping the immortal Turner! Let us offer up our devotions at the altar of art together."

I thought at first he was chaffing; but he was perfectly in earnest, and I let him go on, and pretended to agree with him, and so drew him out. I never heard such bosh before or since. The art-writing of the "Phot. Dial" is nothing to it; though I will say that the painter was in earnest while my friend only pretends the feelings and the knowledge that he writes about. Thus I discovered that my specimens of artadulteration were the works of "the immortal Turner!" "the glorious Turner!" Turnerpsha! I know they turned me sick! This Turner, then, was another great artist; and again I say I don't want to be an artist.

However, it is the custom of the trade to call oneself photographic artist, instead of plain

Now I look upon Art as only another name for fancy and romance and imagination. Those who really believe in it I have generally found to be weak-minded men, and therefore not to be trusted in plain matters of fact. Those who pretend to believe in it are clearly not to be trusted; for, if they draw the long bow in that, they will draw it in other things besides. This is why I have been so particular in stating my views about Art before I tell my story. It is a mysterious kind of story, which I myself could never make out; and I don't wish to be accused of either weak-mindedness or drawing the long bow.

I have a partner in my business, and we have between us, besides our place in town, a travelling photographic gallery. "Humkins and Scrudge" is the title of the firm; and I am Humkins, at your service. I and my partner take it by turns to go out of town year by year, some time during the summer months. I have been half over England in this way; and I can tell you that this doing the provinces is a very pleasant sort of life, and pays well, too. We not only take portraits, but do a good bit of business in the stereoscopic line (perhaps some of my readers know "Humkins and Scrudge's views of Oxford and Cambridge?"): also we take, on order, views of the houses of the gentry round about the towns where we put up. Some would-be gentry, who live in little detached villas with little front gardens to them, give us a good deal of trouble in this way. They can't be made to understand that one cannot take a photograph where there is not room to focus. However, this is what we do in our summer trips-and the trips are very pleasant. We see a number of fresh places and faces; we get a good many negatives on hand, and among the rest an assortment of skies which are worth any money to those who know how to use them! Altogether, doing the provinces pays-pays in the way of health, of pocket, and of new dodges; and I may quote the old line, and say that doing the provinces

"Is the way to be healthy, wealthy, and wise." When I was out in the South on my summer trip some years ago I settled for a week in the small town of L- (I will not write the name in full, for this may happen to come to the sight of the lady-Miss White I will call her-and she might not like old neighbours to know it). Handbills had been distributed some days before, and my first morning's work was a very fair one. I had three pairs of lovers, and about a dozen children-lovers and children are always our most numerous customers, though not the most pleasant ones. Lovers will arrange each other, always preferring one particular side

lovers and mothers-both proverbially blind— are always inclined to grumble at the portraits when they are finished. However ugly and awkward the sitters are, they expect the portraits to be pretty and graceful. They never can understand that the eyes of the camera can't be blinded like the eye of a mother or a lover. On that morning I had the usual trouble with both lovers and children. Lovers would put each other into the worst possible light and the worst possible position, would be full of fluster and blushing, would start and disarrangee verything just at the last moment, would stare each other when sitting out of countenance. Then some of the children were frightened and kicked and screamed, and some were in high spirits and jumped off and on the chair, and some were sulky and stiffened themselves so that they couldn't be got to sit at all. One baby wokeup in the very act of having its likeness taken, and its portrait turned out very much like a catherine-wheel; of course I had several pictures of children with half-a-dozen eyes and any number of fingers; so that the average number of glasses I used was about three to each child. Photographers need have plenty of patience. Taking portraits is a very different thing to having one's portrait taken; and I can fancy, though I am not an imaginative man, that the feelings of the sitter are unlike enough to those of the photographer.

Over and above the positives, I had several orders for negatives. A swell young ensign came to me to arrange about taking a group of the officers of his regiment quartered in the town. A fat oily dissenting parson wanted a hundred copies of himself, to be sold to those sitting under him at seven-and-sixpence a-piece, the proceeds to go towards repairing his chapel. The local actors wanted a group of themselves in the characters of a favourite piece. Two pretty young girls from the Ladies' school wanted themselves taken together, with copies to give to all their school-fellows. Altogether I had done a good day's work, and as I smoked my evening pipe at the door of my van, I felt satisfied. I was knocking the ashes out of my pipe, when an old man in a sober groom's suit came up to me.

"Humkins and Scrudge?" he said to me interrogatively.

Yes, my man," I said, "Humkins and Scrudge. What do you want with them?" Thereupon he handed me a letter, the contents of which ran as follows:

"C Vicarage.

"Miss White wishes two views taken of Cchurch—an interior and an exterior view. She will thank Messrs. Humkins and Scrudge to inform her what would be their charge for taking these photographs.”

I wrote a polite note in answer, enclosing my terms. The groom took it back with him and in less than an hour returned with another letter.

I packed up the necessary traps that night, and started with my wheel-barrow tent for the village of C a little after eight the next morning. The urchins of L cheered me out of the town somewhat derisively, having that sort of contempt for my wheel-barrow tent which anything unaccustomed excites in the urchin-mind. Some of them accompanied me to C, and the C children turned out in mass on my entrance, so that I left quite a crowd outside the vicarage-gate. The distance to C was not more than half-a-mile. I hoped to get my business done and be back again at my van in time for most of the portrait

customers.

The vicarage was little more than a cottage, but pleasantly ivy-covered, and surrounded by a neatly laid-out garden. There was a lady in the garden, dressed in the deepest mourning. She advanced to meet me, whereupon I put down my tent and took off my hat.

"You are the photographer?" she asked. She was a tall, spare lady, not very young. She was pale-faced, and her eyes were sunken and dull. She looked unhappy; but her voice was hard and her manner proud. I had learned that the vicar, Miss White's father, had died about a month before; so I could account for her black dress and her unhappy look. It is strange how differently different people take grief. You may not know that we photographers sometimes have grave offices to perform, and see not a few people in their sorrow. In cases of hopeless illness we are called in to perpetuate the pain-drawn features; more than once I have been sent for to take the cold still image of a dead face. In such ways I have seen a good deal of grief and observed how differently it affects people. It softens some and makes them beg, as it were, by gentle, softened looks and tones and manner for the human sympathy of even strangers and servants. It humbles some who have been proud before, making them feel, I suppose, how all-vulgar and genteel, lords and beggars-are alike impotent in these losses. But others it hardens. They cannot bear their fellow-creatures to know that they are down. They give way to their grief in secret, and come out from their chambers with defiant eyes and rigid mouths. They resent the presence of anyone, fearing that he has a hidden pity for them; and feel as an affront each common act or word of politeness.

Miss White, I saw at a glance, was one of this latter kind. I put on my hat, and said indifferently; "Yes ma'am. Nine into seven, I think you said for the size."

"I consider your charge exorbitant," she said harshly.

I explained why I was obliged to charge what seemed to her a smart price. This bit of

Somehow I knew that she was poor. Her dress was scanty and coarse, the crape was brown, her gloves were stained and mended. I knew that she would have to turn out of her old home, as parsons' families always have. I felt an extra pity for her because she was one of that over-sensitive sort that will not accept pity at any price. These notions passed through my mind as I stood talking. It must not be supposed, however, that I lowered my charge because I pitied her. Feelings are one thing and business is another. If I were Jack Ketch I might feel sorry for the poor fellow with the rope round his neck, but I should do my duty all the same. We always allow a little for coming down, and are open to making bargains, in this branch of our profession. For instance a gentleman says, "I can't give you this price for the front view of my house;" then we say: "Come sir, we'll take the back view in addition at half-price." That is the way we manage it. In the present case, I agreed at last to throw in a small positive of the vicarage for my original charge.

"I will show you the views I want you to take," says she, a little more graciously, when it was settled. She went in for the big church-key, and then we started for the church which was close by. The tail of children followed up at some little distance behind us, taking up their position in rows on the church wall and flat tombstones when we entered the church-yard. Just within the gate, I pulled up.

"We couldn't do better than this, ma'am," says I. The view was capital. I know in a moment what will make a picture, and I knew that I shouldn't get a better view of the church than that.

"That view," said the lady, "will not do." She went on round the church, and by-andbye stopped.

"This is where it is to be taken from," she said emphatically.

Not a good picture; but I saw in a moment why she chose that spot. There was a new tomb-very handsome tomb-in the foreground, with an inscription: "To the memory of the Reverend Theodore White, M.A., &c."

“We are to take in that tomb, maʼam,” I said.

She scowled at me, but her lips trembled. "Yes. Now, I will show you the interior view." So, we went into the church. The view she chose there would not do at all. She had no

D

notion of the light and the dark side of a building. I found that she wanted the pulpit and the Communion-table, and a tall square pew (I suppose the vicarage pew) included in the picture. I managed to get them all from the opposite side of the church, and she said "that would do;" and then, leaving me the key, returned at a quick pace to the vicarage, while I followed more slowly, to arrange my traps.

First of all I took the house, finding all my chemicals to be in capital order. Then, leaving my dark tent in the corner of the garden, as the distance to the church was so short, I prepared | to take the exterior view. By the time that was finished, the sun would have worked round sufficiently for me to set to work at the interior. The children bored me sadly, as they always do. The personal remarks they make one don't care for, nor for the shout of laughter they set up when one puts one's head under the focusing cloth; but they are apt to rush before the lens, in pursuit of each other, while one is taking a picture; and one can't leave the camera at their mercy for a moment. However, I got the old groom, who had brought the letter on the preceding night, to stay by the camera while I took the outside picture; and then I locked the camera in the church, and there it was safe enough.

The church was very dark. I had great difficulty in making out enough of a picture on my ground glass to arrange the camera by. However I got it fixed rightly at last. I wanted more light. The belfry-arch was filled in with woodwork in which were doors. These I opened, and found other doors beyond, leading out into a porch. The porch was closed in by a gate of open paling-work, which was locked; so I could leave open the second pair of doors, too, and get light through the locked paling gate, without suffering from the intrusion of the boys. It was just what I wanted.

I fetched my glass, which had been in the bath while I focussed, locked myself again in the church, put the slide into the camera, and uncovered the lens. Half-an-hour's exposure, I decided, or a little more.

The light was beautiful; the sun was just covered with thin white clouds; there was as much light as one could have without actual sunshine. If the sun would pop out brilliantly during the last five minutes of exposure, nothing else could be desired. I think we photographers come to have a sixth sense about light. We can measure it just as if our eyes were the two pans of a balance. Or, I don't think it is our eyes after all; I think we feel light rather than see it. I know as well as can be when my picture is going on all right in the camera. I feel when a flat grey dulness is creeping over it; I feel the moment when it polarizes into great white patches. I know, when I am about to take it out, the very fraction of a second at which it reaches its best; and sometimes I can't hit upon the exact fraction, because my fingers are not quick enough for my inner sense. Half-an-hour in a church, with nothing to do,

is a long time. The time passes slowly enough when the congregation are in the pews and the parson in the pulpit, but a church is still duller on a week-day. All I could do was to look about me, and even in this amusement I was sadly cramped: I could not move up the aisle far from the belfry-arch without coming into the range of the lens, so that I could take in but a distant view of most of the church.

The boys in the church-yard at first served to distract my attention. Of course they had discovered the open doors, and they collected round the porch-gate, looking between its pales, and crying one to another, "I see un, Billlookye, there he be"; or saluting me with the insulting question, "Who put his head into a box?" But, after a time they became tired of looking through the palings into the church, and began to find it more entertaining to wage war among themselves. The L-boys and the Cboys, I suppose, had a standing feud between them, as all boys of neighbouring places have. There was much rushing round the churchyard in pursuit of each other, and much shouting of their respective war-cries, which consisted, I remember, of-"Who put the wheelbarrow in the pound?" on the L-side, and "Who biled the goose?" on the other. Now and then one would flatten his nose for a moment against a low window, or would send a shrill whistle through the porch gate; but they ceased to take any other notice of me.

I am a good Christian, I hope; and I don't practice my trade (further than printing goes, which one must do sometimes under pressure of business) on a Sunday, as some I could mention do. But I must confess I am not often in a church. For the last two years, or thereabouts, I have been of the Baptist persuasion, and have attended pretty regularly the ministrations of the Reverend Barnabas Shuttledore, of Ebenezer Chapel. Miss Mary Jane Scrudge (sister of my partner), whom I hope next month to lead from the altar Mrs. Humkins, junior, is of the Baptist persuasion and of a religious turn, which facts may account for my present belief. The Baptists have a notion that a church is an improper place, scarcely better than a playhouse, and, though we are to be married in church-the ceremony there performed being held to be the most bindingI am sure that Mary Jane would think the worse of me if I entered a church for any other than professional purposes. Before I began to make up to Mary Jane, I used regularly to have a day out on the Sunday, thinking no harm of it then, though I know better now. But I have said enough, to show why I am not much acquainted with churches in the light of places of worship. In the way of business I have taken some halfdozen or more, and these pretty good samples of the various kinds of churches. I can never make out why they are so different from each other, when, as I suppose, all church-people worship in the same manner and believe the same things.

I have taken churches all titivated off with colour and gilding; the walls covered with

printing, which, like a bad hand, couldn't be read by anybody but the man who printed it; the communion-table set out, like the sideboard in some grand house, with lots of plate, big gold waiters and candlesticks (which the Reverend Shuttledore, preaching from somewhere in Revelations, proved to be the mark of the beast); the pulpit inlaid with sham jewellery; spreadeagles, with bookstands on their backs; tiles, with patterns on them like green-house pavements; gold stars on the ceiling at one end; pews very low-uncomfortable for the back I found on trying them, and without doors-not so private as I should wish my pew to be. Well, that is one kind of church. There is a church in London (I dare say my readers have been to see it among the other sights), which was built as a pattern for this style. It is a regular show place, and very successful I should think. Whether they ever have service in it I don't know for certain, but I fancy not; they would be afraid of spoiling it. This style of church is harder to take than any other, because of the red and yellow glass in the windows.

Then there is another kind of church in London big roomy galleries all round, supported on pillars beautifully painted to look like marble (that now is art I can understand); a great organ, all polished mahogany and gilded pipes, like a handsome clock-case; a mahogany pulpit with an octagon sounding-board, and no expense spared in the crimson cushions and fringes; high, square-what I call comfortable pews; the commandments printed very plain, so that one can't misread them, and framed off from all the rest of the ornaments, as if to draw particular attention. (The architects of the style of church described in the last paragraph seem to me to use the commandments as if Heaven had expressly sent them to them as a nice safe bit of ornamentation that may be zigzagged over their clean-scraped walls in endless varieties of shape and colour.) Then there are monuments of marble, black and white nicely relieving each other, with little fat cherub-heads at the corners, and crossbones and hour-glasses carved in prominent positions. Over the communion-table there is often a picture, which, between the two square windows, looks of an uniform deep brown snuff-colour, except where, in the centre, some white face, with upturned eyes, starts out from the darkness with a sort of ghostly life.

Then there is the country church, of which the C church, now upon the carpet, may serve as a specimen. The country churches, I suppose, will not last long in their present condition, if this rage for titivating holds. Last year I took a view of a village church, which had been lately "restored," as the term is. I don't set up for a man of taste, but it did not seem to me to go well at all with the green grass and the blue sky and the bright sunshine outside. The colouring looked tawdry, like a masquerade dress the morning after. Everything looked too new and polished and clean, as if it had no affinity with those outside weather-influences, producing stains and damp and dust.

I walked up and down my limited space of aisle between the pews, watch in hand, seeing as much as I could see of the church. It was an old ramshackled building. Ages ago everything had been whitewashed that could be whitewashed-ceiling and walls and oak-beams alike; but the weather had been taking the white out of it ever since, marbling the walls with streaks and patches of brown and grey, or vivid green. I could make out in these stains, dim confused landscapes, not unlike the productions of that artist named Cox, before-mentioned. In places the plaster had fallen from the ceiling. The pews were like a parcel of old packing-cases or orange-boxes. I never saw such pews before or since; though the owners seemed chary enough of them, in almost all, their names being printed in black letters on a slab of white ground. The flat square tiles of the pavement had been mended up with common bricks, and here and there a stone had been let in, the whole being assimilated by a coat of green weatherstain. Tiny plants were springing up in the interstices-in the belfry quite a nursery-garden of them. There was a row of high-pointed arches on one side and of low round arches on the other. A great pointed arch led into the chancel. Squeezed up in a corner, between the arch and the first low round-headed arch, was the pulpit. An awfully dark corner-the parson must have had hard work to read his sermon there on a winter's afternoon. The pulpit, I thought to myself, will not come out well in my picture. The font was under one of the pointed arches, just opposite the door. The top of its lid was covered, for some reason or other, with a fool's cap. The lady had wanted me to include the font, too, in the picture; but it was simply impossible. Now, I may be wrong, but this is the notion I have of what was passing in the lady's mind. She was poor; she was going to leave the home where she had lived all her life, and she must have something to take away with her to remember the old place by, though she could not afford to spend much. Perhaps she would have chosen a view of the vicarage before anything (how her eyes brightened up when I promised to throw in that little positive!) but then it struck her, that a view of the church would be more proper. There was the grave, she must have that at any rate; then, there was the font where she was christened; and there was the communiontable where she had taken the sacrament, and where, at one time, for anything I know, she might have had a chance of being married; and there was the pew where she had sat Sunday after Sunday; and there was the pulpit her father had preached from. Women have a sentiment in these matters of religion. I know Mary Jane looks on Ebenezer Chapel as a sort of holy ground; and has a portrait of the Reverend Shuttledore (worst photograph I ever saw) which she hangs up opposite mine.

Well, to go on with my description: through the chancel arch, the communion-table was to be seen; handsome worked cover to it, oak