ibition, "don't--don't show him
the other two."

I was sorry for the poor girl, for I believe she really cared for the
youngster; and as for her looks, they were quite up to the average. But
some evil sprite seemed to have got into Begglely's camera. It seized
upon defects with the unerring instinct of a born critic, and dilated
upon them to the obscuration of all virtues. A man with a pimple became
a pimple with a man as background. People with strongly marked features
became merely adjuncts to their own noses. One man in the neighbourhood
had, undetected, worn a wig for fourteen years. Begglely's camera
discovered the fraud in an instant, and so completely exposed it that the
man's friends wondered afterwards how the fact ever could have escaped
them. The thing seemed to take a pleasure in showing humanity at its
very worst. Babies usually came out with an expression of low cunning.
Most young girls had to take their choice of appearing either as
simpering idiots or embryo vixens. To mild old ladies it generally gave
a look of aggressive cynicism. Our vicar, as excellent an old gentleman
as ever breathed, Begglely presented to us as a beetle-browed savage of a
peculiarly low type of intellect; while upon the leading solicitor of the
town he bestowed an expression of such thinly-veiled hypocrisy that few
who saw the photograph cared ever again to trust him with their affairs.

As regards myself I should, perhaps, make no comment, I am possibly a
prejudiced party. All I will say, therefore, is that if I in any way
resemble Begglely's photograph of me, then the critics are fully
justified in everything they have at any time, anywhere, said of me--and
more. Nor, I maintain--though I make no pretence of possessing the
figure of Apollo--is one of my legs twice the length of the other, and
neither does it curve upwards. This I can prove. Begglely allowed that
an accident had occurred to the negative during the process of
development, but this explanation does not appear on the picture, and I
cannot help feeling that an injustice has been done me.

His perspective seemed to be governed by no law either human or divine. I
have seen a photograph of his uncle and a windmill, judging from which I
defy any unprejudiced person to say which is the bigger, the uncle or the
mill.

On one occasion he created quite a scandal in the parish by exhibiting a
well-known and eminently respectable maiden lady nursing a young