In the days when I was a child--before “films” were so much as heard of--there was a photographer, a certain photographer, very particular, who might have figured in the Arabian Nights as some one of importance. A photographer was then very much a person in the community. If we were a people of nicety as to precedents, I think he would have stood, in all our reckonings, fourth in the realm: minister, doctor, lawyer--_photographer_--with mere bankers, cooks, icemen, aldermen, and mayor, following subservient. Everyone, sometime, somehow, sooner or later, came at last to the photographer. In the flat glass show case that hung outside the steps leading to his upper parlor, they all hung, some of them fiercely in high collars, some of them frightened, in low ones; but all there. I was prepared for a visit to the “photograph parlor” with some occasion, I assure you, the process being long, painstaking, and full of admonition. I was now nearly three years old and there was needed, I suppose, an official photograph to send to distant and inquiring aunts and uncles. I recall the photographer perfectly, or my composite recollections of later years--for he remained long with us--serve me perfectly. He had masses of curly hair through which he often temperamentally ran his delicate long fingers; a poetic personality; and eyes that never left you for so much as an instant, once the real ordeal had begun; and an index finger that flew up and remained rigid at unaccountable moments. He had imagination; for he was repeatedly referring to a little bird, and asking me to look at it, which I did my utmost to see, but which for me was never there. After sundry final preparations I was ushered into the strange “parlor.” I was parted from my mother’s hand, as a ship from her moorings; was for a moment lost, then saved; for the photographer took me in tow. I was guided to a velours chair, and allowed, no, assisted, to climb upon it. There was some talk on the photographer’s part, I believe, of naturalness. Then, almost immediately, he began dancing back and forth intensely, fantastically, with lithe poses and bendings of his lissom body this side and that; his eyes half closed, fixed all the while on me, with a rapt attention I had never before received. “A _lit_-tle more to one side! There!” He even took my head delicately between his terribly firm fingers and turned it ever so little. Why? I should have preferred it as it was. At last his assistant under his direction--a rather elderly man he was, and disillusioned I think, bent, and with long fingers too, but bony and no hair to run them through--placed some sort of a terrible iron thing I never saw nor could have imagined at the back of my head. During all this, the photographer’s eyes never left me. What was it he saw? Then up flew his forefinger. “So! Keep that!” (Keep what?)