Soon after, he has a tintype taken in which a young lady sits in the
alleged grass, while he stands behind her with his hand lightly touching
her shoulder as though he might be feeling of the thrilling circumference
of a buzz saw. He carries this picture in his pocket for months, and looks
at it whenever he may be unobserved.
Then, all at once, he discovers that the young lady's hair is not done up
that way any more, and that her hat doesn't seem to fit her. He then, in a
fickle moment, has another tintype made, in which another young woman,
with a more recent hat and later coiffure, is discovered holding his hat
in her lap.
This thing continues, till one day he comes into the studio with his wife,
and tries to see how many children can be photographed on one negative by
holding one on each knee and using the older ones as a back-ground.
The last stage in his eventful career, the old gentleman allows himself to
be photographed, because he is afraid he may not live through another
long, hard winter, and the boys would like a picture of him while he is
able to climb the dark, narrow stairs which lead to the artist's room.
Sadly the thought comes back to you in after years, when his grave is
green in the quiet valley, and the worn and weary hands that have toiled
for you are forever at rest, how patiently he submitted while his daughter
pinned the clean, stiff, agonizing white collar about his neck, and
brushed the velvet collar of his best coat; how he toiled up the long,
dark, lonesome stairs, not with the egotism of a half century ago, but
with the light of anticipated rest at last in his eyes--obediently, as he
would have gone to the dingy law office to have his will drawn--and meekly
left the outlines of his kind old face for those he loved and for whom he
had so long labored.
It is a picture at which the thoughtless may smile, but it is full of
pathos, and eloquent for those who knew him best. His attitude is stiff
and his coat hunches up in the back, but his kind old heart asserts itself
through the gentle eyes, and when he has gone away at last we do not
criticise the picture any more, but beyond the old coat that hunches up in
the back, and that lasted him so long, we read the history of a noble
life.
Silently the old finger-marked album, lying so unostentatiously on the
gouty centre table, points out the mile-stones from infancy to age, and
back of the mistakes of a struggling photographer is portrayed the
laughter and the tears, the joy and the grief, the dimples and the gray
hairs of one man's life-tine.
Rosalinde.
In answer to a former article relative to the dearth of woman here, we are
now receiving two to five letters per day from all classes and styles of
young, middle-aged and old women who desire to come to Wyoming.
Some of them would like to come here to work and obtain an honest
livelihood, and some of them desire to come here and marry cattle kings.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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