On Moshi's return I claimed his services in hunting up the local photographer. This is a truthful narrative; and therefore it must be seen that I had burdened myself with a new toy inthe shape of a camera, the source of much weariness and vexation before the trip was over. Apart from the trouble of lugging it around and having it in constant readiness—every trifle.tells enjoyment of everything I any. Shall when you are hot or tired—it marred
take a picture here, or wait till further on? was the perpetual harrowing preoccupation. If. I used up my plates in morning, the afternoon was sure to bring some view fairly. clamouring to..\be photographed. If I resisted present temptations and held a plate or two in reserve for something better, that something never appeared. Then there was the business of ebbosing the best point of view;.and the various fiddle-faddle manipulations that were such woeful dissipators of time and good temper. And then,: being the rawest of raw beginners, I bungled sadly and ruined more plates than I should dare confess, Sometimes I had the light upon my lens, and my pains went for nothing sometimes I over-exposed, and the negative was a blur of "fog sometimes I did not expose long enough and had the phantom of a picture; sometimes, though the ex-sure may. been all right, I had often to draw out the shutter of the dark slide; and so through an odyssey of farthing disasters, Why that camera is not strown in splinters about sorite Japanese glen is more than I shall ever be able to undorstand. The man of artvory obligingly placed his dark room at my disposal, and gave me more than one valuable bit of advice. His room for sittings, and those I subsequently saw, were utterly uninteresting third-rate copies of third-rate European studies. The Japanese of to-day loves to have his patient taken sitting stiffly on a chair of the lodginghouse type, with a strip of mean carpet underneath him, an ugly round table covered with an ugly cloth at his side, and a rococo architectural background.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.