Do not throw this circular carelessly aside. Read it carefully over and
act upon it. Some of you are poor spellers, and will try to get out of it
in that way. Others are in the penitentiary and cannot spare the time. But
to one and all I say, write, and write regularly, to the president. Do not
wait for a reply from him, because he is pretty busy now; but he will be
tickled to death to hear from you, and anything you say about me will give
him great pleasure.
N.B.--Please be careful not to inclose this circular in your letter to the
president.
The Photograph Habit.
No doubt the photograph habit, when once formed, is one of the most
baneful, and productive of the most intense suffering in after years, of
any with which we are familiar. Some times it seems to me that my whole
life has been one long, abject apology for photographs that I have shed
abroad throughout a distracted country.
Man passes through seven distinct stages of being photographed, each one
exceeding all previous efforts in that line.
First he is photographed as a prattling, bald-headed baby, absolutely
destitute of eyes, but making up for this deficiency by a wealth of mouth
that would make a negro minstrel olive green with envy. We often wonder
what has given the average photographer that wild, hunted look about the
eyes and that joyless sag about the knees. The chemicals and the indoor
life alone have not done all this. It is the great nerve tension and
mental strain used in trying to photograph a squirming and dark red child
with white eyes, in such a manner as to please its parents.
An old-fashioned dollar store album with cerebro-spinal meningitis, and
filled with pictures of half-suffocated children in heavily-starched white
dresses, is the first thing we seek on entering a home, and the last thing
from which we reluctantly part.
The second stage on the downward road is the photograph of the boy with
fresh-cropped hair, and in which the stiff and protuberant thumb takes a
leading part.
Then follows the portrait of the lad, with strongly marked freckles and a
look of hopeless melancholy. With the aid of a detective agency, I have
succeeded in running down and destroying several of these pictures which
were attributed to me.
Next comes the young man, 21 years of age, with his front hair plastered
smoothly down over his tender, throbbing dome of thought. He does not care
so much about the expression on the mobile features, so long as his left
hand, with the new ring on it, shows distinctly, and the string of
jingling, jangling charms on his watch chain, including the cute little
basket cut out of a peach stone, stand out well in the foreground. If the
young man would stop to think for a moment that some day he may become
eminent and ashamed of himself, he would hesitate about doing this.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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